Tag: church

I’ve Become a Catholic

Earlier this year, after a lifetime in charismatic Evangelical churches, including 13 years helping to lead a Baptist church, I became a Roman Catholic. 

Earlier this year, after a lifetime in charismatic Evangelical churches, including 13 years helping to lead a Baptist church, I became a Roman Catholic. 

For the last 6 months I have not written or talked about this change publicly both because I wanted to give a chance for my family to adjust to our new lives and because I do not consider myself qualified to be an internet apologist for Catholicism. However, I have just begun a new academic year as a Catholic University Chaplain (you can follow me here and here) and, since posts have begun to appear that look conspicuously Catholic, I thought I had better say something for those who are confused or bewildered.

Catholicism is Great

First, I really like being a Catholic. I don’t want to come across as a triumphalist convert. I am acutely aware of all the foibles, failures and frustrations of the reality as well as the theory of the Catholic Church. But notwithstanding all of that; I love her. Catholic Christianity is saturated with grace, makes coherent sense of Scripture, invites me to participate in the single greatest intellectual and spiritual tradition in the history of humanity, provides me with beauty and wonder, enfolds me in the most diverse organisation in the world, and, most significantly, offers me the substantial body and blood of my Saviour. I go to Mass often; I would go every day if I could.

My wonderful, intuitive and succinct wife pointed out to me a while ago that we used to speak often of being hungry and thirsty for Christ. Now I feed on him each week in the sacrament. When my priest hears my confession and speaks the words of forgiveness and cleansing over me it does not merely communicate a spiritual reality, it brings that reality into existence in my soul. The liturgy in my local parish is not as much fun as a really well constructed and executed worship set. But it brings me the voice of Scripture and prays in return everything that needs to be said in a way that is both concise and beautiful.

Moreover, to become Catholic is to join oneself to the whole communion of the Saints throughout the ages in a way that is real and powerful. My experience of the history of the church and her great heroes as a Protestant was similar to the way I might think of great Spurs players of the past; I can look at them and learn from them but not play with them. Indeed, I am being generous here; as a Protestant I could only really publicly learn from or acknowledge a few – principally Augustine and the Reformers. Aquinas, Bonaventure, Therese of Liseaux and so on were, to say the least, suspect. Were they great heroes for us or suspect? Now I not only learn from the saints, I pray with them and they with and for me. My whole understanding and appreciation of the truth of the resurrection of the dead and the communion of saints has been transformed by the knowledge that those who go before us still stand with us, pray for us and do so powerfully.

Being a Catholic is great.

I Still Love Protestants

I still love Protestants.

Becoming Catholic is obviously a huge decision. It has meant changing job, moving house and has put strain on relationships I had previously thought strong. There are obviously some profound theological differences between the evangelical and Catholic understandings of Christianity. I don’t want to diminish those differences. Some are relatively trivial. Others are more profound. But for all this I do believe that my brothers and sisters in Protestantism are just that: brothers and sisters and I have nothing but love for them. 

My own reception into Catholicism is not, from my perspective at least, a repudiation of the evangelical charismatic world or a denial of God’s work within it. I remain grateful for all God did in me and my family through the work of bodies like New Frontiers and the brothers and sisters we worshipped with and pastored at HBC. I believe the Spirit is really at work in and through them, changing lives, saving souls and healing bodies. The work those churches do is extraordinary and profound as is their love for Scripture and the Spirit. I would not be who I am without them; I love them and continue to pray for them.

This is, no doubt, hard for some to hear. Inevitably there is a sense of loss when someone becomes Catholic, especially if, like me, they have worked and pastored in a Protestant context. For those who hear of my conversion and feel some sense of pain at it, I hope it will be reassuring to know that I became Catholic because I positively believe the Catholic understanding of Christianity to be a true and good fulfilment of everything I experienced in my Protestant faith. It is not, in this sense, a rejection of anyone but rather a continuation of the same pursuit of Christ that characterises evangelical piety. Indeed, a crucial part of my own emotional journey towards Catholicism was reading the works of Joseph Ratzinger and deeply desiring the knowledge of Christ and the joy in his beauty that I discovered there.

So, how did it happen?

Conversion is Both a Process and a Punctuation Point

Coming to the Catholic Church was very like getting engaged. I can tell you the time and place I became engaged to Heather. It was a Sunday evening in late August in my parents’ living room. I know what we ate just before it (lasagne) and how it happened (I wrapped a ring in a series of boxes like Russian dolls before going down on one knee). I asked her to marry me, she promised to do so and we were engaged. In the same way I can tell you the day and the time I became a Catholic. On 20 March 2025 at about 1845 I stood before Fr Con Foley at Christ the Prince of Peace in Weybridge, promised to receive all that the Catholic Church teaches as revealed by God. He laid his hand on my head and prayed for the Spirit to fill me and use me. I was filled with joy and then received my first Eucharist. It was, like our engagement, one of the most important days of my life.

It is important that both our engagement and my reception into the Church were definite moments. Before I asked Heather to marry me, she had made no promise to do so. We were not pledged to one another. Something changed in that moment as we went from one state to another. In the words we exchanged and the physical pledges we offered, our status was altered. Before that service on 20 March I was not a Catholic. I had not promised to obey the Church’s teaching, had not acknowledged it as revealed by God, and could not receive the Eucharist. When people ask me when I became a Catholic, therefore, I tell them that I can name the day and time just as I know the moment I became a fiancée (and later, even more so, a husband).

At the same time, conversion, like engagement, is the culmination of a process that takes time, sometimes years, proceeding on occasions dramatically and at others imperceptibly. My engagement to Heather was the fruit of a year of friendship and love between us. Going back further, it flowed from the work of God in both of our lives shaping our desires for a partner and a life lived for God. Over time it became increasingly clear where that process would likely be leading until Heather was sat at a dining table with a ring on her finger and a crying man at her feet. We were not engaged until that moment, but that moment came because of everything that had gone before.

My coming to the Church was similarly a process that, viewed in retrospect began many years ago. It proceeded through a thousand questions, prayers and experiences that led to it. It came through my wrestling with Scripture, with prayer, with pastoral work and with history. It came through moments of grace and joy, tears and frustrations, through pain and through the providence of God.

I mention this to reassure those who find themselves on a spiritual journey of whose destination they are as yet unsure. I did not believe my journey would lead to the Church until it was nearly over. Christ led me through all my preaching, friendships, prayer and pain to a place I did not anticipate. It was a hard journey. And yet, from this side I can see his grace and love in it.

For me my conversion is a process and a punctuation point. Prior to 20 March I never preached or taught anything that was distinctively Catholic. My theological arguments proceeded using Protestant sources and logic. Nor did I receive communion in a Catholic Church. I was not a Catholic until that time.  And yet from the perspective of my being a Catholic I can see how that evangelical work, the love of Scripture, of the Church, of God’s people and work, led me to find my home in Rome. I hope it will lead me deeper and deeper into God’s love and his Church.

Where To from Here?

If you are still reading this post, I imagine you may be interested in what I am going to do next and what has come of my wonderful wife and her ministry. I am at present working on finishing my PhD examining Baptist doctrines of the Church in conversation with Joseph Ratzinger. While I am doing that, I am the Catholic chaplain at Royal Holloway University and about to begin teaching RS at a local secondary school. I have no idea what God’s plan is for me in the future save that I would love for it to involve bringing as many people to know Jesus, to find love in his Church and to receive his grace as I can.

Heather’s story is her own to tell. For the moment I can say that she, too, has experienced a great joy in becoming Catholic and has found particular peace and fulfilment in the Eucharist and in a deepening relationship with the Saints of the Church. She is currently working in a prison as a chaplain. I have never seen anyone more obviously used by God to bring light into darkness.

If you would like to know more about how this all happened, please feel free to reach out to me privately. We value and covet your prayers above all.

Having Hope in an Age of Darkness

In a season of darkness we can keep on choosing life. We can be committed to embracing new life in babies, to making our homes, families, workplaces, friendships as open to life and grace as we can. We can embrace the stranger, care for our elderly, show love and compassion to our enemies. We can resolve never to give in to nihilism or self-centredness and instead keep living for the sake of God and of others. This will not be easy. But it is possible because God keeps his promises.

Do not be afraid! God keeps his promises.

I wrote these reflections on how to live free from fear and anxiety, how to be a people of hope, before last week’s decision concerning assisted suicide.1 In light of that vote, however, these ideas are particularly important. 

One of the famous texts that is read at 9 Lessons and Carols most years is Jeremiah 33:14-16. It is all about hope and fear.

Jeremiah begins his message to Israel with reassurance about God’s faithfulness:

The days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will fulfil the good promise I made to the people of Israel and Judah.

It is worth sitting with this for a moment. God makes promises to us. He is a promise making God.

Incidentally, God doesn’t have to be like this. He could be arbitrary – doing whatever he wants whenever he wants it. That kind of God is a tyrant, untrustworthy and unreliable. We intuitively know God isn’t like this. It is written into the very fabric of the universe which, completely unnecessarily, is governed by laws. In that it reflects the character and mind of its Creator.

One of the earliest things we read God say in Scripture is a promise. We can read about this in Genesis 3:14-15.

Through Eve and then Adam sin had entered the world. She had received a message from an angelic messenger – pictured here as a serpent – who tempted her with a promise of power. If only she defied God, humanity would take God’s place. And so she had taken the fruit and ate. It was an act of defiance, of rejection, and it brought a poison into humanity that would eat up and kill generation after generation. They would be cut off from the presence of God and his light. This is always the path when we choose darkness. Man and woman are promised that they will become like God; instead they become less than human. The rejection of light and life is the embrace of darkness and death.

But at the outset of this creeping darkness God spoke a promise of light. One day there would arise a woman who would have a Son and that Son would crush the serpent. He would provide a Redeemer to deliver humanity from the curse it had brought upon itself. These promises are repeated in different forms throughout the Scriptures to Israel and then to her kings and prophets. King David is promised a son who would reign not as one who dies but who lives forever.

We can read these promises, and receive them for ourselves. Perhaps you feel you have had promises from God – that you would flourish, that your friend or family member would come to know Jesus, that he would never forsake you. But at times it feels as if the promise is failing. We wait and wait but still the darkness advances and we come to fear the future, to fear the power of the Serpent, to fear that God has failed.

That was the position of ancient Israel when Jeremiah spoke. The promise to King David seemed in ruins. The kingdom he built had divided, his sons had failed morally, politically, militarily. And his people were going into exile. On and on the darkness marched as the Serpent’s voice seemed the only one that sounded.

It was precisely at this time that Jeremiah reaffirms the promise. He calls his people to hope.

God speaks in the midst of the darkness and what he says is “Fear Not!” “Do not be afraid”. The God of Israel, of the Cosmos, of your heart, is the God who lives and reigns even when darkness abounds.

The hope of Israel may seem to have fallen and been crushed but God is going to make it spring up, sprout from the broken stump of David’s line. Can you feel the imagery? David’s tree has been axed down, felled and broken. But in this moment of death God is going to bring resurrection. 

And so we come to Luke 1 and the story of the annunciation. The familiarity of the verses can blind our eyes to the reality of what is happening.

Here is the second woman, filled with grace (v.28). Your copy will read “highly favoured”, literally, saturated with God’s gifts. She is one who has been prepared and sanctified by God for this moment. While Eve’s sin had separated humanity from God and now to Mary comes the word: “God is with you”. Eve had brought the Serpent to power; through Mary will come the One to crush that Serpent’s head. And where Eve had defied God’s design for her grasping power and equality with God, Mary would reply “I am the Lord’s servant…May your word to me be fulfilled.” To the woman comes an angelic message. The promise is to be fulfilled. David will have his king to sit on the throne.

Suddenly, when hope seemed lost, when Israel was dominated by tyrants, humiliated and oppressed, when the promises of God were a long-held but distant memory, God acted.  He had been working through all the ages even when we could not see it.

He was working in Cain and Abel, in the flood of Noah, in Abraham and Joseph, in David and Solomon, in Ruth and Moab, in Esther in Exile, through Isaiah and Jeremiah and Micah and the Macabees. It was hard to see, darkness seemed to reign, death seemed ever more present. Fear was a natural response. And yet God was working.

And so he brought a new Eve, ready to bear the fulfilment of every promise – the eternal yes, the final word: Fear Not!

Even as Christ battled demons, diseases and demagogues, darkness and death seemed to triumph. But a voice would echo from the despair of Calvary: Fear Not! And Christ would rise triumphant from the grave.

My friends and fellow-sinners. I don’t know what promises you have received from God this year or through your life. Some of us are in that moment of rejoicing, standing with St Mary and acclaiming with joy: How can this be? What a God who fulfils his promises!

Some of us are in exile with Jeremiah, looking at a life which seems marked with pain where the presence of evil is all too obvious. The temptation is to despair, to succumb to fear of the present of the future.  If that is you, you are in good company. But my message to you this morning is the same as Jeremiah’s: Fear Not! 

The God of Israel, the God of Eve and Mary, the God of Jesus Christ has not forsaken you or forgotten you. It is precisely from the place of death that we encounter resurrection power.

The world can seem increasingly dark. There are wars and rumours of wars. The gospel retreats in the West even as it advances in the East and in Africa. At times it feels as if the Serpent is winning and the kingdom of death and darkness are at hand. But even now, especially now, God is at work. He has not forsaken us. He will not forsake us. Fear Not!

There will be a day when you will stand in glory with Mary and acclaim the glorious faithfulness of her Son. When you will stand with Jeremiah and say: I saw the fulfilment of the promises. When the hand that flung the stars and surrendered to nails will wipe the tears from your eyes and speak over you words of love and grace. Fear Not!

If your life is hard, then take heart. God hasn’t forsaken you. Lean into him. Find a good prayer app or practice that you can hold onto even when life is hard. You can try the Bible in One Year, Lectio 365, or Hallow.

Often the answer to our prayers, the fulfilment of God’s promises in our lives, requires our consent, our courage. Mary is our mother in this: we need to resist the temptation to become hardened or so sad that we are unable to say ‘yes’ when the promises begin to be fulfilled.

Finally, we need the courage to live as men and women of hope and life in the midst of a culture that embraces despair and death.

Our culture is becoming increasingly dark. This is likely to continue. Once one has accepted the logic that unborn life can be terminated for reasons of convenience or, to be blunt, finance, the logic of terminating other inconvenient life becomes irresistible. And so it has proved. This is a deeply dangerous trajectory for a society to be on and it can cause us to feel lost and afraid.

The alternative is to have the courage to keep on choosing Christ, to keep on choosing life. We can be committed to embracing new life in babies, to making our homes, families, workplaces, friendships as open to life and grace as we can. We can embrace the stranger, care for our elderly, show love and compassion to our enemies. We can resolve never to give in to nihilism or self-centredness and instead keep living for the sake of God and of others. This will not be easy. But it is possible because God keeps his promises.

    1. I refuse to use the euphemism ‘assisted dying’: words matter and we should not hide from the reality that what was approved last week is physicians giving poisons to patients so that they can kill themselves ↩︎

    The Dignity of Life

    All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

    All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

    This week I want to think about one of the most pressing, important and sensitive issues we can: the dignity, value and sanctity of human life.

    Before I write another word, I want to acknowledge that this topic may bring up painful memories, experiences or ideas. In a blog I cannot possibly do justice to the pastoral or emotional issues that arise when we consider abortion, euthanasia, war, or any related issue. For that reason I want to ask for your patience and forgiveness for when I misstep or write clumsily. Above all, however, we must always remember that while it is vital that we speak and think with clarity and courage on these issues, Jesus came not to condemn but to restore and that there is always grace and forgiveness available to us in him.

    [If you’re interested in some Bible passages that relate to these ideas, you can find them here]

    1. The Central Importance of Life

    There is no more important issue in all human ethics – all moral questions – than the dignity and value of human life. It shapes and affects everything. Your view of this question changes your answer to every other question.

    Christians make several startling claims about the value of human life that change the nature of every other discussion profoundly.

    We believe that human beings, both male and female, are created in the image of God. Pause there. That is the ethical point being made in the story of Eve being created from Adam; not that she is inferior to him or an afterthought. Rather that she is inseparable from him. Men and women together equally share in God’s image and his dignity.

    We believe that every human being is, in the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, ‘unique and unrepeatable’. You matter as an individual. You are not a lego brick, interchangeable with a million others, whose only purpose is to make a bigger model. You are unique. God saw you in your mother’s womb, before you were born. He chose you. 

    As Benedict XVI beautifully put it, while evolutionary theory may picture how God took the stuff of this world and shaped it into people, nevertheless ‘we are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.’

    We believe, therefore, that every human being has an inherent dignity and worth that does not depend upon others. Every life matters whether other people love it and cherish it or not. It is inherently worthy because every individual is known to God and loved by him. Every person is, to quote the Psalmist, ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’.

    This means that a person’s value, dignity or worth does not increase or decrease as they age. It does not depend upon race or social class, upon intellectual ability or usefulness to a society. It does not diminish upon injury or disability.

    This is one of the major problems Christianity has with ideologies or belief systems that make the individual’s worth and dignity contingent on their value to the rest of society. Communism, Fascism and other forms of totalitarianism are offences against the idea of the dignity and worth of the individual created in the image of God and of infinite value to him.

    It is also one of the major problems with seeing people as a bundle of characteristics, each of which increase or decrease their significance. You are not worth more, you do not have greater dignity, if you are black or white, male or female, attracted to men or women. That kind of thinking leads inevitably and inexorably to the oppression of groups and divisions between people. 

    All human lives are possessed of God-given value and rights from the moment they are conceived – when God knits them together in their mother’s womb and begins to plan the adventures he has for them – until the moment they die.

    We do not, we dare not, violate that dignity in others or in ourselves. To do so is a crime against the person and, most profoundly, against the Creator whose image they bear.

    All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

    1. Ethical Implications

    What then does this mean for our moral lives?

    It means that to be a Christian is always to be pro-life. 

    I am going to explain what I mean by that in a moment. Of course it is nuanced. But it is not negotiable.

    The witness of the Christian church from its beginning today, in almost all places and at all times, is that to follow Christ means to be for life. 

    That is why Jesus came for us. He came in order that we might have life, and life to the full, life that extends to the ends of the earth, to the depths of hell, and beyond the limits of time.

    To be a Christian is to be pro-life because Jesus is radically pro-life.

    This has implications that are uncomfortable to talk about in polite British society.

    Because Christians believe in the dignity and value of every life, irrespective of age or gender or race or class, we should work to reduce and then eliminate abortion and oppose euthanasia.

    Human dignity and worth do not start at a low level, increase until a point of maximal productivity in mid-life and then decline as we get older. Putting it as baldly as this might sound odd. But that is functionally how much contemporary ethical dialogue proceeds. It is common to come across the sentiment that the very young are inconvenient, unnecessary and it would be better all around if they weren’t born at all and there were fewer people. Or that the views of the old should be given less weight and less priority because they in some sense count for less than those of the young.

    The creeds begin their narrative of Jesus’ life by recording that he was ‘conceived of the Holy Spirit’. The gospels speak of how John the Baptist leaped in his mother’s womb in celebration of the presence of Christ. That is a reflection of one of the great joys of expecting a baby – to feel him or her move while still within the womb.

    Abortion is a direct attack on the weakest human lives. Intentionally ending the life of an unborn human being represents a rejection of the dignity and value of those seen only by God, loved by him, and yet treated as disposable by others.

    Now I will concede immediately that these are profoundly painful issues and if anyone is struggling with this, I am happy to listen, to pray and, if needed, to extend God’s forgiveness. 

    But we have to confront this painful reality. 

    More than seventy million abortions occur throughout the world each year, significantly more than the whole population of the UK.

    Every. Year.

    This is almost as far from God’s desire and plan for us as it is possible to get.

    We will think about the broader questions in a moment. But being pro-life does not mean only that we work for the elimination of abortion.

    It means opposing the intentional taking of life in other situations.

    Euthanasia is not compatible with Christianity. We do not have the right to take another’s life from them. Nor do we have the right to take our own lives.

    Suicide, whether assisted by others or not, is a subject of extraordinary pain. Who truly knows the anguish and illness that afflicts someone who would take their own life, except God himself. 

    We address these issues not to condemn those on whom we pray God has mercy and compassion but to protect and care for those who are in pain now.

    I can offer many pragmatic arguments against assisted suicide from my time as a lawyer, times when I have seen people take major decisions because of perceived pressure or depression about their worth to others. We protect them against the effects of those decisions because we recognise that they are not thinking clearly. 

    Or the fact that the vast majority of those who attempt suicide and survive (between 90 and 95%) do not end up killing themselves. To quote the New England Journal of Medicine, this suggests that ‘many suicidal crises… including attempts that were expected to be lethal’ are actually of a ‘temporary nature and fleeting’. In other words, the evidence we have suggests that the majority of people who try to kill themselves regret it and, if they survive the attempt, do not try again.1

    The idea of a settled suicidal wish, for the vast majority of cases, is just not true. And it is a profound and awful tragedy when, instead of working to make that person’s life better, society colludes in ending it.

    Yet these are not the most basic arguments. Most fundamentally, euthanasia is wrong because this is a person made in God’s image and neither we nor they have the right to end their life.

    All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

    We could go on to talk of other examples of affronts to human dignity such as war, capital punishment, poverty, discrimination and so on. We will return to these ideas later in this series.

    1. Putting It Into Practice

    What should we do about this? How should it affect the way we behave?

    As Voters

    As voters, there is realistically no mainstream option among political parties for those who want to work to eliminate abortion.

    However, we can campaign on and ask candidates for their plans to reduce the conditions that make abortions attractive.

    In the UK, this takes the form of policies such as removing the limit on child benefit, to build more homes, to increase access to adoption services. Each of these might have a measurable effect on the demand for abortion.

    We can write to MPs and campaign on the issue of Euthanasia when it comes up. The same applies if the nation is being taken into an unjust war.

    As a Church

    As a church we should continue to promote a culture that embraces life. That means being clear that caring for the elderly is a priority for us, within our church community and beyond.

    It means welcoming children and supporting families with babies. This means going beyond Sundays to the work that we do with midwives, health-care visitors, toddler groups and so on. 

    As Individuals

    As individuals, the most important thing we can do is to pray.

    Beyond that, however, let us challenge ourselves: do we see all people as created in the image and likeness of God? Do my actions and interactions with others reflect this belief?

    What about the people who bother us at work, at home, or at school? Do we care for them as made in God’s image? 

    All human life is sacred, given by God and should be cherished and protected.

    1. Matthew Miller and David Hemenway, ‘Guns and Suicide in the United States’, N Engl J Med 359.10 (2008) < https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0805923#:~:text=The%20temporary%20nature%20and%20fleeting,on%20to%20die%20by%20suicide. > ↩︎

    God is Love

    God is love. He gives love to us. We give it away to others. 
    A guest post from the inestimable Heather Fellows.

    Here’s a guest post from the inestimable Heather Fellows.

    God is love.  He gives love to us.  We give it away to others.   

    I want to share some of the ideas I was meditating on when I went away on my retreat a few weeks ago. I have drawn particularly on Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, God is Love. You can find a copy for free online if you want to read it.

    Introduction

    Christianity has been transforming societies across the world for the past 2,000 years. The positive impact of the Church cannot be overstated: guided by the teachings of Jesus, Christianity has touched virtually every part of life. Over the centuries, the Church has founded schools, hospitals and orphanages. Christians have campaigned for prison reform, better housing and an end to the slave trade; they have helped to establish a huge number of charities to support the poor, the underprivileged, prisoners and their families, the homeless and those seeking justice. Churches run marriage courses, thousands of parent-and-toddler groups and provide support for the bereaved. The people of this church make sacrifices day in and day out for the good of others. 

    Research in the UK in 2015 for the Cinnamon Network calculated that the time given by churches and faith groups to their communities through social action was worth more than £3bn a year.[1]  I imagine that figure is much higher now, if only through inflation.

    And that is staggering, isn’t it?  So, what has, and what continues to motivate the Church to reach out in these kinds of ways day after day, century after century? 

    Love. 

    Love is at the heart of it all.  Jesus says that God is, Himself, love.  He defines what love is.  And Jesus ultimately demonstrated what this love looks like by laying down his life for us on the cross. 

    Today I want to spend a little time dwelling on the love of God.  What does it mean to us and for us? And what is its impact upon us?

    I’m not going to quote long bits of the Bible here. But if you want to dig into where this comes from, you can look at 1 John 4: 7-16 and Mark 12: 28-31.

    God is Love

    When looking at the subject of love, we must begin with God himself.  Only after that can we begin to think about what love means for us. 

    What does it mean to say that God loves us?

    We love, John tells us, because God first loved us.  God is the source of love.

    We all need to be loved.  We know that if a child is deprived of love when they are an infant, it has huge implications for their life.  It leads to attachment problems, anxiety, insecurity and many other things. 

    So perhaps it should come as no surprise to us that the Bible and especially the New Testament, is laced with references to love.  We need it like we need air to breath and water to drink and food to eat.  And so God, in his great mercy, came down to earth, to meet our greatest need. 

    This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 

    Our sin separated us from God and this was a big problem.  From that point on mankind has been restless.

    I think we can sense that in the world around us, can’t we?  People are always seeking and searching for something and yet there is a sense that it is always slightly out of reach.  And God’s answer to the problem is love. 

    Love looks like God himself taking the form of a man and coming to the earth to live and die in our place, bearing the weight of our sin upon his shoulders and paying the price we can never pay, so that we might be united in love with him.

    God loves man with a personal, elective love.  He chooses Israel and loves her, but precisely with a view to healing the whole human race.  God gives her the Torah, the Law, opening Israel’s eyes to man’s true nature, his sin, and showing her the path leading to true life.  And man, through a life of fidelity to the one God, comes to experience himself loved by God, and discovers joy and truth and righteousness – a joy in God that becomes his essential happiness:

    “Who do I have in heaven but you?  And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides you…for me it is good to be near God” (Psalm 73).  

    How beautifully the Psalmist captures the heart of one who has come to know something of the depths of God’s love.  There is nothing that matters more.

    Our society is obsessed with love, but there is something distinct, something unique about God’s love.  If you know your Greek, you might know that the most commonly used word for love in the New Testament is agape.  This is the kind of love demonstrated by Jesus.  It is a kind of love whose concern is not primarily for oneself, but for the other.  The kind of love we often seek is more of an eros love.  This kind of love is a desperate, and hungry longing that desires to be filled for its own sake.  It says, I need something and you can give it to me.  But what God does is to intervene in man’s search for love in order to purify and perfect it.  He unites our eros desire with his agape selfless love and creates something beautiful and powerful. 

    Jesus sums this up so well in Luke 17:33 when he said, “Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it.”  The essence of love and life itself is found in giving it away, just as Jesus himself so perfectly modelled.

    But as well as there being a hunger in each of us to be loved, so too God loves.  God’s own eros desire for man, his passionate love for us, is also totally agape, totally self-giving.  God’s love is unmerited, we have done nothing to deserve it, in fact we rather deserve death for turning our backs on our Creator.  But God loves us with a passionate and forgiving love.  So great is God’s love for man that by becoming man he follows man even into death, and so reconciles justice and love.  The Song of Songs describes God’s relationship with man and man’s relationship to God.  It is a love poem and pretty erotic in places:

    I belong to my beloved, and his desire is for me: (Song 7:10)

    The essence of biblical faith is that man can indeed come into union with God.  Our search for peace has a true destination. 

    In Jesus we see that it is God himself who goes in search of the lost sheep – the lover in search of his beloved, culminating in his death on the cross – giving himself in order to save man – love in its most radical form. 

    When we take Communion we remember that Jesus has given his body and blood as the new food from heaven. 

    Before Jesus, the Jews understood that God’s Word was man’s real food – the Old Testament says that man cannot live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.  But this same ‘Word’, the word become flesh as John puts it, now truly becomes food for us as love in the person of Jesus. 

    When we take Communion, we enter into the very dynamic of Jesus’s self-giving.    And in taking this meal in communion with each otherwe remember that union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself.  I cannot possess Jesus just for myself.  We become one body with Christ, together.  And so we see how the love of God and the love of our neighbour are now truly united.  Communion includes the reality of both being loved and loving others in return. 

    But this love doesn’t stop there.  As we accept and receive it, as we receive Jesus into our lives, God’s love is poured into us, saturating our hearts and minds and transforming us from the inside out into the very likeness of Christ.  God’s love fuels and enables our Christian life.

    In Romans 5:5 it says: “… God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”

    It’s the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise in John 7: 37: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”   If we want our lives to be characterised by love, then we need Gods love first. 

    There is one God who is the source of all that exists, and we need to come and drink from him if we are to know love and life as he intended. 

    Jesus himself tells us that the focus of our lives should be love.  When Jesus is asked which is the most important commandment, he answers by uniting into a single precept the commandments to love God and love your neighbour.  The two are intertwined.  And this echoes the passage we read in 1 John; we cannot truly love others, without first experiencing the love of the Father.   It is a response to the gift of love with which God has drawn near to us. 

    That same love which prompted Jesus to lay down his life for us, God’s love, has been given to us if we have received Jesus into our lives. 

    And so as we have considered something of the nature of God’s love for us, we must now look at what it means for us.  Because the very nature of God’s love is that it was designed to be given away, to impact the ones to whom it was given, to impact us. 

    And how does his love impact our lives? 

    We know from the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan told by Jesus that our neighbour is everyone and anyone.   Love for others should absolutely characterise the church family and it is the place where no-one should go without.  But loving our neighbour is a much wider calling.  It is a call to love everyone we meet. 

    And Jesus had a particular heart for the poor and the least in society. This is what he said in Matthew 25:31-36:

    “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

    “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.’

    “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

    “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

    Jesus identifies himself with the least. 

    The love of God and love of others are inextricably bound together. He is the stranger, the prisoner, the who is hungry and naked. 

    Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. (Matt. 25:40)

    In the least in society, Jesus tells us, we will find him.  And we know that in Jesus we find God. 

    God is, of course, everywhere and we all bear his image, but Jesus says when we show love to the least, we are especially loving him.   God’s love is taking a hold in our hearts, we are beginning to love with a God-like love in response to his love for us.  And in doing so our own appreciation of God’s love for us grows.

    When Gods radical, self-giving love is poured into our hearts, something happens.  If you are a Christian here today, perhaps you can identify with this.  As we receive God’s love, we find ourselves feeling a love for others that we cannot explain and didn’t previously experience.  Sure, was a nice enough person before I was a Christian and I was, mostly, hopefully, kind to my friends and polite to people I met.   But God’s love goes far beyond niceties.  God’s love extends to the poor and the stranger and the outcast. 

    Putting Love Into Action

    First, let’s ask God to help each of us to know more deeply and fully his love for us. 

    Why not spend some time this week chewing over some of the verses we have looked at today? 

    God loves you so much.  His desire is for you.  Do you know that?  If you aren’t a Christian, perhaps you are hearing this for this first time.  Perhaps this speaks to you and there is a deep desire in your heart to be loved.  Then God’s word to you today is this ‘I love you so much that I gave my only son for you, so that by believing in me you might not perish but have eternal life.’  Come to me, he says. 

    And second, if you have received Jesus into your life, then do you know that his transforming love has been poured into your heart by the Holy Spirit?  Perhaps you have experienced hurt and your heart has grown a little cold.  Ask God to reveal his love afresh to you today, invite him to pour his love afresh on you, to warm your heart. 

    Finally, Jesus’ s love for us was never meant to be kept to ourselves, but to be given away.  In fact it only truly finds completeness as it is given away.  Why not ask God to open our eyes to the people around us to know how we can love them today?

    Who are your neighbours?  Who is at the school gates or in the office?  Where are the poor near you?  I once prayed a prayer asking God to show me the poor in Hersham and he did just that, which is another story.  It was a ‘take me deeper than my feet could ever wander moment’.  It’s a powerful prayer to pray.  But in seeking to love others, God has moved powerfully in my own heart too.

    Who needs to know God’s love this week?  We could do worse than just ask that question each day. 

    With all those we encounter in everyday life, we are called to reflect God’s love by seeking to see them as Jesus does, attending to their practical needs, but also keeping in need their deepest need of all, for Jesus himself.

    God is love.  He gives love to us.  We give it away to others.  

    [1] Cinnamon Faith Action Audit, May 2015, p.4; Louise Ridley, ‘Could The Staggering £3bn Social Contribution Of Religious Groups Be The Antidote To Austerity Cuts?’, HuffPost, 20 May 2015 <https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/05/20/church-groups-community-social-contribution-tories_n_7321288.html> [Accessed 17 May 2024]

    How to Share Your Faith

    Sharing our faith can be hard but it is worth it because we believe this is the only way to life. Real life. Eternal life. And fullness of life here and now.

    This is a guest-post from the inestimably wonderful Katherine Brown.

    I want to think about evangelism: sharing our faith. 

    Lots of us have different reactions to evangelism, it stirs up emotions. Some of us steel ourselves. Some of us might be combative, not taking the time to understand the person in front of us. Others here are worried about sharing their faith; people at your work, or your neighbours, have no idea you’re a Christian and it feels like a big jump to even tell them that let alone share the gospel. Still others are struggling with disappointment; people you’ve prayed for years still seem hard to the gospel. 

    The reason we want to share our faith is because we believe this is the only way to life. Real life. Eternal life. And fullness of life here and now.

    Chris’s Story

    I have a friend called Chris who, whenever we would talk about evangelism at church, would have a really strong reaction to it. She would reply that she had tried that: ‘None of my neighbours talk to me. It’s too painful.’ 

    Yet over the last year her household started praying for those neighbours. She got a dog and started to go on walks around the neighbourhood. After that she and her neighbours started having faith chats and had friends come to church for the first time. She says nothing about her skill or her ability has changed, but her expectation for what God can do has. She’s now expecting missional opportunities. 

    How great is that? Chris is in her 50s, and gave her life to Jesus as a kid, and God has given her freedom in this area just in the last year. So even if you have never shared your faith and feel a bit like Chris, God can still bring a breakthrough in this area of your life.

    Jesus and the Power of Interruption 

    In Luke 5:18-25 we read a famous story about Jesus.

    As the story opens, Jesus has gathered a crowd, we don’t know what Jesus was teaching the crowd about. The focus isn’t actually on that at the start. Attention in this story is directed to unknown, seemingly insignificant, people, just a few in the crowd. 

    They’re desperate because they get through the crowd So they climb up onto the roof and find a way to get through the roof and lower their friend down. 

    The friends and this man are coming to Jesus with a physical need, if you asked someone what this man’s biggest need most is would say it’s that he’s paralyzed. That would be horrible. But Jesus sees a deeper need, a much bigger reality. The man thinks the best thing that could ever happen to him was not being paralyzed, but Jesus shows Him there is so much more on offer than physical healing. This man needs forgiveness, he needs to be in a right relationship with God. 

    The Pharisees are mad, Jesus has made a claim authority in this story. Declaring that He can forgive sins. The Pharisees understand that this is Jesus stating he is God. 

    Jesus is interrupted as a man appears through the ceiling (which is pretty dramatic). Yet the interruption doesn’t stop the ministry, it’s part of it. Perhaps it is in the interruptions that God is wanting to work.

    We should be open to interruptions in our lives, not seeing them as a nuisance, slowing us down, getting in the way, but an opportunity. This means seeing the people in front of us and slowing our lives down. Who knows what God might want to do. 

    It also means being able to see and meet the needs that people feel and experience. It might be loneliness or hunger or pain. In Jesus’ case it was the man’s paralysis. But at the same time it was for him (and for us) seeing the need that everyone has for forgiveness and spiritual healing.

    Sharon’s story 

    People come to Church, and enter into conversations about faith,  with all sorts of preconceptions, wants, desires and needs. But the biggest needs for all people,  no matter how dire their situation, is their standing before God. We all need to know forgiveness from God. 

    Most people won’t be aware that this is their biggest need. This is part of evangelism, it’s helping people see that they are in need of saving, that they are in need of forgiveness, that they can receive a right relationship with God. 

    Lynn’s Story

    We don’t really like to talk about sin in our culture, most people believe they’re a good person because they don’t do anything illegal. 

    My husband sat down with a neighbour who’s in her eighties.  She had listened to one of Jon’s talks where he’d spoken about sin and forgiveness. She was upset: 

    ‘But you’re a good person Jon, I’m a good person, we haven’t done wrong, you’re not a “sinner”.’ 

    He then went on to try and convince her that he had done and does do wrong (which is a bit of a weird conversation). She said that the sin Jon spoke about wasn’t that big a deal, it didn’t make a difference, it wasn’t really hurting anyone. 

    But the reality is, the standard we need to get to to be right with God is perfection, which is, in one sense,  really bad news.   We all know that we’re not perfect. 

    If this story ended there, Christianity would be pretty rubbish, but it is because of what Jesus did on the cross that we can know forgiveness, that we are made right with God. 

    In this story Jesus looks at this paralysed man, and knowing everything about him, calls him friend and forgives him of his sins. When sharing our faith, we’re inviting people to realise that they are fully seen by God, that means God knows everything, has seen everything, every thought, every desire, every feeling, every action. Hidden, unspoken and seen. 

    We’re inviting them to have this sober reflection of their lives, but also knowing that Jesus will call them friends, that through their confession and repentance God will forgive their sins. We’re letting people know that they can be in a right relationship with God. 

    Paul and the Questions of the World

    In Acts 17:16-33 we find St Paul in ancient Athens. 

    He looks around the city and is moved by their idol worship.  He listens to their conversations and sees the people in the marketplace.  He asks questions and as he does so he notices the things they love, the stories they’re telling, the gods they’re worshipping, and some of the stock phrases they say 

    Then he takes the time to consider how to proclaim the Kingdom of God into this culture, for these people. 

    Paul is being culturally relevant in the best way, not watering down the gospel but proclaiming the truth in a way that can be easily understood. Paul initiates an evangelistic opportunity, he interrupts the cultural status quo, and does so in a way that shows he understands he gets it.  

    He can see they’re religious. He’s read their poets. He’s seen their idols. And he’s not willing to just let it be. No, the Kingdom of God must be proclaimed and he’s willing to be sneered at. 

    This is challenging 

    God will interrupt us and give us opportunities to share our faith. But we see through Paul as well and through the life and teachings of Jesus – that we are to initiate evangelistic opportunities. 

    What does this look like? 

    Well it’s not just waiting around for people to ask questions, to stop us in the park, or to ask to come to church with us. 

    It’s being the one to step out and initiate the conversation- Paul shows us that this is done well through engaging the marketplace- getting out of the Christian bubble- and talking to people! 

    First, are we aware of the idols in our culture? Are we aware of some of the cultural storylines that swirl around? 

    I don’t have time to talk through all of the cultural storylines but one that I think seeps into the church and relates to evangelism is the postmodern storyline. In very simple terms this says that your truth and my truth can exist together. So you can believe what you want as long as you keep it to yourself. When we allow this idea to shape us, a fear of mission is then birthed in us, we think that we’re just not that good at sharing faith when really it’s a product of the cultural story that says keep your beliefs private. 

    An easy way to engage with culture and look for ways to initiate evangelism is by reading the news, watching popular TV shows that your conscience will allow, listening to popular music, to see what people are worshipping, what is shaping our nation, and praying and considering how to share the gospel by starting a conversation about something that people are already engaged with. If you know a conversation about a TV show is going to come up at work, have prayed about it before and considered what questions you could to take the conversation deeper. 

    Then most challenging of all: not everyone believed. Some did, some wanted to hear more. But some sneered at Paul. It’s not nice being mocked. It’s not nice being disliked. But that is part of evangelism too. Sometimes people won’t respond well. We have to keep preaching the gospel to ourselves, and keep Christ central when this happens, because it is hard, it rocks our emotions, but God is so delighted when we act in obedience, stand up for his word and speak out the good news. 

    What Does This Mean for Us?

    So what does this mean for all of us? 

    Well sharing faith is an adventure that God has invited us into, like all good adventures, it will have highs and lows, challenges and joys. The most wonderful thing about it, is that the pressure is off because we can’t save anyone, only God can. We’re just giving people the opportunity to know God, to get right before him. We give the invitations; then it’s their decision whether they come to the party. 

    Disappointments lifted. If you have been sneered at, so has Paul. So has Jesus. We all will be, that doesn’t mean that you are bad at sharing your faith. 

    Increase boldness- to go for it- to be interruptible- God interrupt my ordinary everyday! And willingness to interrupt. 

    For some it will be choosing to ‘walk round the marketplace’, to do some cultural homework and consider how you might bring up gospel conversations. 

    If you’re not a Christian, I was encouraged to try praying, so I encourage you, why not give prayer a go just see what happens. Invite God into your life, open your heart to Him. 

    Is Jesus True for Everyone?

    Jesus is true for everyone. And that’s really good news.

    Christianity is what is called a missionary faith. We are people with purpose – to bring the whole world to Jesus and to enable people to know him. We are explicit about it. We want to help people to convert.

    This idea makes some people uncomfortable. In fact, for the reasons I’m going to explain, it not only makes sense, it is good. 

    I’m not going to extract loads of Bible verses. But you might want to read these passages if you want to see some of the Scriptural background to what I’m saying.

    1. Christianity claims to be the truth.

    First, we need to see that Christians make some profound claims about Jesus.

    Jesus himself claimed to be one with God – his perfect representation on earth. That is what he is saying in the reading we heard from John’s gospel – when you look at Jesus, you see God.

    That isn’t something later Christians made up. It goes right back to the beginning. In Colossians, written right at the start, Paul claims that God fully dwells in Jesus.

    That doesn’t mean that Jesus is the only thing that tells us anything about God. We can learn something about him in lots of places – creation, culture, beauty, even the mathematical laws of science reveal the brilliant mind of God.

    But it is in Jesus that we see God clearly, and fully.

    More than that, Jesus is the only way to God. Everyone needs Jesus and it is only through Jesus that human beings can be forgiven their sin, healed, and receive eternal life. Everyone who is saved will be saved through Christ.

    Again, these ideas are central to who Jesus claims to be. 

    1. Why This Makes Sense

    Given that this is what we believe, it makes complete sense to argue that Christianity is the true religion and that it is true for everyone.

    Against this some people argue that all religions are simply different paths to God. It doesn’t matter what you believe; all roads lead to the same place in the end. Therefore, it is said, we shouldn’t try to convert one another.

    This argument is, to put it as charitably as I can, absolute nonsense. Even worse, it is patronising and slightly racist nonsense.

    First, it doesn’t understand the way facts work.

    When you claim something as an objective fact, it is either true or false. Universal facts aren’t true for some people but not for others depending on how they feel. They just are.

    Suppose someone said that Swindon Town are in the Premier League this year. And I said that they aren’t. It doesn’t matter how strongly he feels about it, it is a question of fact. It is either right or wrong.

    That is either true or it is not. What it cannot be is true for some people but not for others.

    Everyone knows this but somehow forgets it when it comes to questions of faith.

    That brings me to the second point: it doesn’t understand how religions work.

    Christianity and other faiths make truth claims. They are at least as much about facts as feelings.

    Christianity makes claims about the true nature of the universe. It claims certain facts to be true: that there is one God, that Jesus is his Son, that he did die and then he rose again. Moreover, it is through him that people are saved.

    Christian theologians and evangelists support this arguments by appealing to philosophy (arguments about why it is sensible to believe in God), human experience (the desire to love and be loved), and history (the evidence for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus).

    Muslims, by contrast, believe that Allah has no Son, that Jesus was not really divine, that he did not really die and that he did not rise from the dead. They don’t believe that people are forgiven by trusting in Jesus.

    These are truth claims about the nature of reality and history. And they directly contradict Christianity. 

    Christianity and Islam cannot both be true. They contradict one another. Just like the earth cannot both be a globe floating in space and a flat desert carried on the backs of a giant turtle.

    That isn’t to be critical of Islam or any other religion. Quite the opposite. It is to take them seriously. 

    By contrast the person who seems to love all religions equally actually despises and patronises each of them.

    It is nonsense to suggest that they are just different ways of saying the same thing. 

    Nor is it arrogant to suggest that if one is right, the other is wrong – it is simply reality.

    1. It is Good to Try to Convert Each Other

    Still, maybe it is bad to try and persuade people to change their religion.

    This argument sounds kind. But it is also really bad:

    It treats people like children who don’t have the ability or the right to make their own decisions. More than that, it actually leaves them in danger. Finally it ignores and treats as unworthy of respect the stories of those who have decided to change religion, even in terribly difficult circumstances.

    Trying to persuade someone to change their mind about something important is both a mark of respect and, if it is because you want their good, an act of love.

    We persuade people of important things because we think they are able to make decisions for themselves. It is a mark of our respect for them. They don’t need to be coddled or wrapped in cotton-wool in case an idea upsets them. They are a real person, with their own mind and desires and eternal soul.

    Moreover, we should try to convert them not just because we respect them but because we love them. If Christianity is true, then their eternal soul is dying from the inside out. They are in danger of eternal death. To try and prevent that is not disrespectful or unkind; it is a mark of profound love.

    Finally, to believe in preaching the gospel and trying to bring people to Christ is to take account of the lives and stories of those who have given everything to follow Jesus and found profound joy and peace in it.

    I could tell you of the 45 Ugandan martyrs who converted to Christianity. They were executed by the Ugandan king, Mwanga II, in 1880 when they refused to renounce Christ.

    Or in 2015, of the 21 Egyptian Orthodox Christians who were kidnapped and executed by Islamic State for refusing to renounce Jesus. They died audibly praising his name.

    Or of those I myself have baptised who have fled their homes and countries in the Middle East for the sake of choosing Jesus and are unable to return.

    I could tell you story after story of men and women who have lost enormous amounts in order to gain Christ and consider it a brilliant trade. Christianity takes their stories, often from within marginalised and ignored communities seriously.

    So what should we do about this?

    • Lean into Jesus and commit to him. The truth about Jesus is far better, more profound and more satisfying than we often remember. If you are a Christian, lean into your faith. Get to know it. It is very cool and deeply joyful.
    • Be humble, curious and prayerful with friends from other points of view. Evangelism is only morally good when we genuinely care about those we are going to; it is only effective when they understand and trust that we care about them.
    • As you listen, seek points of overlap to give away to share Jesus with them. Because you respect and love them, try to convert them. 

    Jesus is true for everyone. And that’s really good news.

    What Is the Future of the Church?

    We don’t need a church that celebrates the cult of action in political ‘prayers’. It is quite superfluous…the future of the church, this time as always, will be shaped anew by the saints. By people who are aware of more than mere phrases, people who are modern but have deep roots and live in the fullness of the faith.

    We don’t need a church that celebrates the cult of action in political ‘prayers’. It is quite superfluous. Therefore it will collapse of its own accord. From today’s crisis this time too a church of tomorrow will rise, which will have lost much. It will become small, and to a large extent it will have to start again from the beginning. It will no longer be able to fill many of its buildings that were built in times of prosperity. Because of the number of its adherents it will lose many of its privileges in society. Unlike in the past, it will present itself much more strongly as an optional community, which can only be joined through a decision to do so. It will surely find new forms of office and ordain reliable Christians as priests, who also have other jobs. But, as before, full-time priests will be essential too.

    The future of the church will not come from those who just follow recipes. It will not come from those who just want to choose the easy way. Those who avoid the passion of the faith and call anything demanding false and obsolete, tyrannical and legalistic. To put it positively: the future of the church, this time as always, will be shaped anew by the saints. By people who are aware of more than mere phrases, people who are modern but have deep roots and live in the fullness of the faith.

    But despite all these changes which we can imagine, the church will again decisively find its essential being in what has always been its heart: faith in the triune God and in Jesus Christ. It will be an inward church, which does not bang on about its political mandate and flirts as little with the left as with the right. It will rediscover its own core in faith and prayer and experience the sacraments again as divine service, not a problem of liturgical design. The church will find it hard-going. For the process of crystallization and clarification will cost it much labour. It will become poor, a church of the little people.

    The process will be long and difficult. But after the test of this letting go, great power will stream from a church that has been taken to heart and become simplified. For the people of a wholly planned world will become unutterably lonely. When God has disappeared from them, they will feel all their terrible destitution. And then they will discover the little community of believers as something completely new. As a hope that takes root in them, as an answer, which they have always secretly been seeking – as a home which gives them life and hope beyond death.

    Joseph Ratzinger, Glaube und Zukunft (Munich, 1970) (quoted in Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life (Volume 2), p.70)

    How Can I Live My Best Life?

    If you want to live your best life, follow Jesus and go to church.

    This year I’m writing a series of posts thinking about big questions that lots of us have about Christianity, Jesus and faith. Some of them are about how we can live well, some are doubts we often have but don’t know how to express.

    I want to say at the outset that in preparing these posts I have extensively used a book that I want to recommend: Rebecca McLaughlin’s, “10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (And Answer) About Christianity”. 

    Rebecca and I were both studying at Cambridge at about the same time, although as far as I can remember we never met. That is one of my few regrets from those years because she is one of the most interesting and insightful Christian writers around and I would have loved to have got a headstart on hearing what she has to say.

    Everything I’m saying, Rebecca said first and better. I want to urge you to get the book and read it, particularly if you are under 25 (but also if you’re older than that).

    The Big Idea

    I always try to give a summary of what I’m going to say in one or two sentences so it is easy to remember. Here is today’s:

    If you want to live your best life, follow Jesus and go to church.

    Readings

    A lot of this post isn’t going to be me going through Bible passages. But there are some things that Jesus said that help us to think about this:

    “[Jesus said], I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10)

    “Then [Jesus] said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” (Luke 9:23)

    “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.” (1 John 3:16)

    “[St Paul taught] that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” (Acts 20:35)

    “[St Paul wrote] give thanks in all circumstances” (1 Thessalonians 5:18)

    The rest of this post is going to be hard and fast and fun.

    In the Old Testament there’s a phrase about getting ready: “gird your loins” – it literally means,  “put your big boy or girl pants on because it’s going to get real”.

    So, here are 5 big reasons why living your best life means going to church and following Jesus. 

    1. Going to Church Makes You Happier and Healthier

    In the past there were people, very clever people, who have argued that people would be better off without religion. Lots of people like that argument – it can feel comfortable to be told that you’re better off without God.

    Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for us, we now have loads of evidence that the opposite is true. 

    Tyler VanderWeele is the Professor of Epidemiology in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Harvard University. That basically means he is one of the elite guys working on public health in the world.

    His research, together with 20 years of studies by others, shows that going to a religious service weekly gives you a significant chance of living longer, living more healthily, being less depressed, less prone to addiction, less likely to commit suicide, and generally more optimistic.

    In case you were wondering if this applies to any regular group activity – like joining a football or golf club – it doesn’t. Studies show that doing something non-religous even with the same people every week doesn’t work the same way.

    Professor VanderWeele describes going to church as “a miracle drug”.

    This doesn’t mean Christian life is easy. Jesus himself suffered and said we would too at times. Globally 11 Christians are killed for their faith every day. But even with those trials, being in church is demonstrably the best way to live a healthy, happy and long life.

    If you want to live your best life, follow Jesus and go to church.

    1. Love Adds Life

    So being in church is good for you in every measurable way.

    What about following what Jesus taught?

    Christians believe that “God is love”. Jesus’ most famous command was that we should “love one another as I have loved you”.

    That kind of love isn’t about feeling warm towards someone or being romantic with them. It means putting their interests above your own, even when it hurts. It means being willing to sacrifice for them. 

    We know what love is by looking at Jesus. That’s why we fill our halls and homes and necks and clothes with crosses. Because love adds life. And this is how we know what love is.

    Again, we find that Jesus’s teaching was right and 2,000 years ahead of modern thought.

    Scientists at Harvard University studied happiness for 75 years. People thought that happiness would come chiefly from success, fame, or wealth. But it wasn’t any of these things that really made a difference. The thing that makes the biggest difference is having good relationships with friends and family. 

    Love adds life. 

    One of the teachings most central to being a follower of Jesus is his promise that “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it”. 

    Again, Jesus said it 2 millennia ago. Now we have the data to show he is right. Scientists have shown that helping others is good for us. It might even be better for us than the person we help.1 Selfishness makes us miserable. Selflessness makes us happy.

    But maybe you think that you don’t need to go to church to be unselfish. Obviously you’re right. But you are much, much more likely to be unselfish if you do. As Rebecca observes “in America, people who go to church every week give three-and-a-half times as much money to charity and volunteer twice as much as people who never go to church.”2

    If you want to live your best life, follow Jesus and go to church.

    We’re half way through now. Take a moment to pause, catch your breath and turn to the person next to you. Ask them : “Are you alright?”

    1. Gratitude and Forgiveness Are Good For You

    So we’ve covered going to church and the big commandments. But what about the little stuff. Like the prayer we pray each week saying thank you to God for what we have, asking for forgiveness and offering it to others?

    One of the defining things about Christians is that they say thank you. We thank God for the goodness of the world, the relationships we have in it, for Jesus being willing to give himself for us to bring us life.

    But saying thank you doesn’t feel amazing.

    I love Christmas. It’s great. But the worst part comes afterwards when someone responsible, I’m not going to name her, turns up with a box of notes and announces : “it’s time to write thank you cards”.

    Saying thank you sounds like a chore. We have to remind young children (and sometimes adults) to do it. 

    But again, psychologists have found that choosing to be grateful – to say thank you – makes us happier and healthier.3

    It’s the same with forgiveness. 

    Jesus was huge on forgiveness. Every week we pray “forgive us … as we forgive”. St Peter once asked if he should forgive seven times. Jesus said “no, seventy x seven”. He even forgave people as they executed him.

    Forgiveness is hard because anger and hatred and bitterness feel good in the moment. But forgiving others makes you live longer, and feel better mentally and physically.4

    If you want to live your best life, follow Jesus and go to church.

    1. Grit is Good

    I love the Rocky movies. I watched them as a kid, introduced Heather to them when we started going out (it’s a true test of a girl’s commitment), and then watched them with my kids. One of my proudest moments was when, after a month of Rocky, my daughter Abi wrote in a year 4 essay that she didn’t like to see animals fight but liked watching men fight. 

    Rocky has what psychologists call grit. I can’t put it better than the great man himself .

    What Rocky is describing is something psychologists call “grit”. It is the ability to keep going when times get tough, to persevere even in hard times. Psychologists have found that this quality makes more of a difference to success in the long term than intelligence, beauty or talent.

    Grit is all over the New Testament. Jesus teaches us to follow him by walking a hard road, St Peter calls Christians to self-control and perseverance, the writer of Hebrews urges us to “run with endurance.”

    And instead of just relying on our own grit, our own ability to get hit and keep moving forward, God gives Christians a Helper, the Holy Spirit, a kind of Divine support team who encourages us, empowers us and keeps us.

    If you want to live your best life, follow Jesus and go to church.

    1. Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems

    Finally, I want to quote a giant of 20th century theology, the Notoriouis B.I.G.,

    I don’t know what they want from me
    It’s like the more money we come across
    The more problems we see    5

    I’ll keep this one short. Jesus says that “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

    As St Timothy explained, “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”

    Again, Jesus turns out to be right. 

    In fact, if you want a career in psychology it’s probably safer to just assume Jesus is right and start from there.

    When this has been studied it turns out that choosing money over friends and family leads to unhappiness.6

    By all means try to get money. It’s good to have money. If you’re going to use it to help others and serve God. Otherwise you’re going to end up miserable, broken and away from God and others.

    If you want to live your best life, follow Jesus and go to church.

    Application

    What does this mean for us as we try to know hope, show hope and share hope:

    • First, if you want to know hope, make coming to church and following Jesus a priority this year. If you want to be happier, healthier, stronger and more influential this year, come to church and follow Jesus.
    • Second, if you want to share hope, find someone to help and show love to. It will make their life better and yours too.
    • Finally, if you want to share hope, then invite someone else to come to church. It really can make a huge, measurable difference to their life not just in a mystical or spiritual sense but in every sense.

    If you want to live your best life, follow Jesus and go to church.

    1. Caroline E. Jenkinson, et al., “Is Volunteering a Public Health Intervention? A Systematic Review and Metanalysis of the Health and Survival of Volunteers,” BMC Public Health 13 (2013): 773. For a study on caring for others being more beneficial for the carer than the cared for, see for example, Susan Brown, et al., “Providing Social Support May Be More Beneficial Than Receiving It: Results from a Prospective Study of Mortality,” Psychological Science 14, no. 4 (2003): 320–27. ↩︎
    2. She cites Arthur Brooks, Who Really Cares (New York: Basic Books, 2006), p.34. ↩︎
    3. Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, “Counting Blessings versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no. 2 (February 2003): 377–89. ↩︎
    4. “Forgive to Live: Forgiveness, Health, and Longevity,” Journal of Behavioral Medicine 35, no. 4 (2012): 375–86; Loren L. Toussaint, Everett L. Worthington, and David R. Williams, eds., Forgiveness and Health: Scientific Evidence and Theories Relating Forgiveness to Better Health (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015). ↩︎
    5. Bernard Edwards / Christopher Wallace / J Phillips / Mason Betha / Nile Gregory Rodgers / Sean Combs / Steve Jordan – Mo Money Mo Problems lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner Chappell Music, Inc ↩︎
    6.  for example, Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 88–89. ↩︎

    Five Reasons I Love Church

    Church is where you can find community, diversity, history, legacy and Jesus.
    It’s great. It can change your life.

    When I was younger it was fashionable among some Christians to speak negatively about the church. You might have come across something of that sort: “we love Jesus but we’re not wild about the church”.

    I’m not sure where that impulse comes from but I imagine it may in part flow from a desire to win people by distinguishing “real” Christianity from unappealing, ritualistic or just old-fashioned expressions of the faith. To some extent I can understand that point of view, especially if it really is aimed at winning people to Jesus. It is not, however, a view I share at all. I love the church in general and my church in particular. I think it’s great and I would love to share what it’s like to be part of the church with as many people as possible.

    There is a huge amount that could be written about this. But here are just five reasons to love the church (and why you should join one if you haven’t):

    1. Community

    Being part of the church is to be a part of a true community. When I am sick, people visit me, care for me, pray for me. When I am stressed they check in with me. When we had our kids they cooked for us, cared for the babies when Heather was sick, babysit so we can invest in our marriage, and love and care for our children. They give us money when we need it, encourage us when we are down and correct us when we are wrong. They do this not because they like me (sometimes I am pretty unlikeable) but because they love us even when they don’t like us.

    I am not saying that this type of community is only found in the church. But that is where I have found it. And I haven’t experienced it in the same way anywhere else. This is how human beings are created to relate to one another and life is better when we live this way.

    2. Diversity

    The church is the most diverse organisation in the history of the world. Every week we pray the Lord’s Prayer. When we do we are joining with people in literally every part of every continent on earth. We live in a small, very white, very British part of the world (and it’s a great place to live). But our church is filled with people from ten or more nationalities from four different continents each living authentically and yet worshipping Christ together.

    Moreover most weeks in our church we find people of every age from a baby of 9 weeks to a lady of 93 years. My children grow up seeing and knowing not only their friends or ours but men and women who are old enough to be their great grandparents. And because we are in church these people care about my children and try to take an interest in them.

    Again I am not saying the church is definitively unique. But I haven’t found this blend of committed, diverse groups anywhere else.

    3. History

    When we join the church we are not only becoming part of a global family, we are joining in a group that has a history going back thousands of years. Some of the prayers we pray on a Sunday have literally been prayed every week for millenia. 

    The way we express our faith inevitably adapts to the culture we’re in (I doubt Jesus used an iPad even if Moses definitely used a couple of tablets). But fundamentally we are following the same teaching, the same ethics, the same view of the world that Jesus, Paul, Augustine, John Chrysostom, Luther, Calvin, Shaftesbury, Wilberforce, and Luther King Jr all followed. 

    In a world where ideas change at lightning speed and people’s lives are increasingly marked with uncertainty and fear, the church is a tree with seriously deep roots. And I love that.

    4. Legacy

    The ethical legacy of the church is unparalleled in human history. It has improved the lives of women, minorities, children, the aged all around the world. The historian Tom Holland and theologian Glen Scrivener have each written deep historical studies about the ethical legacy of Christianity. It is so pervasive and so saturates our culture that even the ideas we consider self-evidently true (like the need for consent for sex, to treat people with equality, that human rights exist) come from Christianity.

    We can go further, however, historians have demonstrated over and over again that the modern scientific method is rooted in Christian beliefs about the world. We expect the world to run according to laws that we can discover precisely because we believe in a lawgiver. 

    None of this is to deny that the church hasn’t caused suffering to people at times. But even the language and ideas we use to critique the church’s actions are grounded in Christian ideas that were developed and articulated in the church. 

    Almost everything good about the modern world is a direct or indirect result of Christianity in general and the influence of the church in particular. 

    5. Jesus

    Most fundamentally I love the church because I really love Jesus. And the church is where it is easiest to meet him.

    Jesus is, quite simply, the greatest and most significant person not only in my life but in the history of the world. He changes lives and transforms societies. You don’t need to be in a church to meet him – last year I baptised an Iranian lady who miraculously encountered him in a society that could not be more hostile to the church. But that is where you will find him most easily.

    Church is where I hear his words read, where I meditate on his life, where I am challenged to follow his teachings, where people pray for me in his name, where I receive his body and blood, and where I commit myself to him week after week.

    Conclusion

    So there you are: five reasons to love the church. I don’t mean to sound overly triumphalist or insensitive. But I want to be open about how great this is. 

    If you haven’t been along to a vibrant, lively, caring church then find one near you as soon as you can. If you’re a Christian and not going regularly then let me gently ask: why not? What is more important?

    I love the church. It’s great. It can change your life.