Tag: jesus

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 ↩︎

    Can I Be Good Without God?

    Can we be good without God? No. 
    In fact, on our own we wouldn’t even know what goodness is. But in and through Jesus we can be forgiven and accepted anyway.

    Because God exists we know what goodness is. And through Jesus we can be forgiven and accepted even though we don’t do it.1

    Introduction

    Today I want to think about whether we can be good without God. 

    At the outset I want to clarify what I am saying and what I’m not. I’m not saying that it is impossible to be good without believing in God. It is, of course, perfectly possible to do good without believing in God. But it is impossible to do good without God. That is to say, if God does not really exist then doing good is impossible.

    This is an important point but it is obvious if we substitute ‘fly to New York’ for ‘doing good’ and ‘aeroplanes’ for ‘God’.

    It is perfectly possible to fly from London to New York without believing in aeroplanes. Believing in the aeroplane is irrelevant to your ability to rely on it and let it transport you. You might be unconscious for the whole flight. You might be mad and imagine that you are flapping your arms the whole way. 

    However, it is impossible to fly from London to New York without aeroplanes. In the whole history of humanity until the invention of the plane, noone managed it because it could not be done.

    I am arguing that while it is perfectly possible to do good without believing in God, it is impossible to do good if God does not exist.

    My argument has three parts:

    First, that morality – good and bad/right and wrong – is real. This is what I call the ‘moral law’.

    Second, that the moral law’s reality depends on God or someone like him existing.

    Third, that it is Jesus who shows us truly what the content of the moral law is.

    1. The Moral Law is Real

    In Romans 2, St Paul argues that there is a moral law – a sense of right and wrong – and that deep down everyone knows this even without being told. 

    To be plain, what I mean is that right and wrong are real things. They aren’t just questions of taste – like whether you prefer chocolate or vanilla ice-cream. Rather they exist independently of us and over us.

    That is how we speak – how we argue – by appealing to principles that are above us. We assume that there is a moral law at work in the universe and that everyone ought to obey it.

    It is fashionable to ignore this and deride it, particularly on the left. There is a great temptation to say that there is no such thing as objective morality that ought to be known and shared by others. Yet, the funny thing is that even those who argue for this position in one moment, then appeal to morality in the next. 

    The man may say there is no moral reason people should keep their promises. But if you try and break a promise to him, he protests that you are not being fair. Or he tries to justify breaking his own promise by some other factor that means he hadn’t really broken the moral law at all. 

    This was brought home to me when I studied legal philosophy at University. My teacher, a brilliant legal philosopher called Nigel Simmonds, knew that there were lots of smarmy undergrads who would object that right and wrong were not real. He offered to debate the point. But only with someone who really believed that the transatlantic slave trade was fine. Unsurprisingly, no-one argued the point. Everyone knows right and wrong are real things and those who say they are not are just playing games.

    It is not an objection that different societies have different moralities. They differ in the way it works out (who we should be unselfish towards) but they always agree you should be unselfish to someone. They agree that you cannot kill whom you please but disagree about the precise way of working that out.

    Here I am making a limited point. I’m not arguing that every culture, everywhere has agreed on right and wrong. They plainly haven’t. But they do all agree that there is something called right and wrong. They all agree that there are things that we shouldn’t do, not just because they are inefficient or hurt me. But because they are wrong even if they benefit me or enable me to get what I want.

    This is the universal experience of humanity, even those who protest it.

    Before moving on, we should note that we all break the moral law. We know it. That is why we feel guilty or ashamed at times. Noone has to tell us to feel that way; often no one knows what we have done. We can try to dampen down that feeling by making an excuse or blaming someone else. 

    Ultimately, however, even our excuses demonstrate that we feel there is something we need to excuse. We know that there is a moral law. And we know that we break it.

    1. The moral law depends upon God

    So the moral law is real. There is a sense of ‘ought’ that every human being shares and which governs the way they behave.

    But what lies behind it?

    There are basically only two explanations for existence.

    The first is materialism. In this view, everything comes down to matter bouncing off itself and colliding with the world around it. The materialist believes that matter and space have always existed. Noone knows why, what caused them, and any question like that should not be asked because it is difficult to answer.

    The matter bounced against other matter until, over time, by a mindbogglingly unlikely series of accidents, governed by the operation of laws (which came from nowhere and were caused by no-one but which are nevertheless extremely powerful), the matter rearranged itself into creatures that we call humans. On this view there is no such thing as a ‘mind’, ‘thoughts’ or ‘morality’. Only stuff. There is nothing fundamentally different between a man and a mountain except the arrangement of matter.

    The other view is a religious view. 

    On this view the universe was caused by a mind that chose to make it. The religious view argues that this great mind thinks about things, cares about things and has a purpose for the universe he created. Its laws are perfectly explicable because they are made by a lawgiver. It worked to produce creatures that think just as it thinks. 

    The religious explanation accepts that the Creator works through physical processes. It accepts that stuff changes because it hits other stuff. 

    The key difference is that for the religious explanation of existence, there is such a thing as mind and morals. Indeed, they are the most fundamental reality.

    These views have both always been present in humanity. 

    The argument can’t be settled by science because science does not and cannot address any of these questions. All science does is tell you what is physically happening. It doesn’t tell you what is behind it anymore than a TV replay can tell you conclusively why a football manager picked a player or waited to make a substitution.

    Now that doesn’t mean that we cannot answer the question.  We have some information that helps us. 

    We know that human beings universally experience themselves and the world around them as if minds and morality are real. 

    In every place at every time people have behaved as if the moral law is real, even if they have disagreed about exactly what it means. Everyone knows there is something they ought to do and that sometimes they do not do it.

    Let me put it more plainly. We know from our own experience and the experiences of every other person that the moral law is real. In the only place we could expect to find evidence that minds and morals are real, we find evidence that they are.

    We find that we know that something or somebody wants us to behave in a certain way and that at times we don’t. This only makes sense if there is something directing me and everyone else. 

    What is more, this is very much like a mind. Matter cannot give us a manual. Atoms cannot give advice. Only a person can do that.

    And so we find that we have arrived at a second point in our argument.

    There is such a thing as the moral law.

    Behind the moral law must be a mind, a lawgiver. This is what we call God.

    1. Jesus

    Everything we have said so far points to the idea that there is a God. It is almost impossible satisfactorily to account for the way human beings experience the world – which is the thing in the universe we have best evidence for – without God. 

    We should note that this is a vision of God that is uncompromising and strong. The moral law is absolute – it tells you to do whatever is right, however hard it is to do. The mind behind the universe must not just be a bit good. Our experience suggests that he must be absolutely good. And that is terrifying.

    We know three things.

    First, we know there is a law because we all experience its effects. 

    Second, we know that because there is a law, there is a law-giver. There is no other satisfactory explanation for its existence.

    And third, we know that we break that law. And the universal experience of laws is that breaking them has consequences. This isn’t comfortable. But it is true. And truth is, at the end of the day, the most important thing.

    So what do we do about it? What is the truth about this moral law? And how do we fix the problem of our breaking it? This is where Jesus comes in.

    Christians don’t believe that everyone else in the world is completely wrong in their beliefs about the universe. 

    Atheists believe that they are completely right and everyone else completely wrong. Christians are more generous. We believe that there is usually some echo of the truth in every culture and religion. It is there, a story that keeps being told, an intuition that can’t be shaken off. It is like everyone has had a dream they know was true but they can’t quite remember.

    Now, to be clear, where other belief systems differ from Christianity, we believe that it is right and they are wrong. But there is something of God remaining everywhere. And Jesus fulfils and makes known to us this God. 

    More than that, he takes the consequences of our breach of the moral law, of our continual failure to do what we know is right. 

    Christians believe that in Jesus, God became one of us. 

    In his teaching we hear the moral law that all societies know in part explained to us perfectly. To love one’s enemies, to care for the poor, to refuse revenge, to love and honour one’s spouse, to forgive. In these words we find the summation of the human moral project. Noone has improved on it. Those who have tried – like Marx or the Communists – have only succeeded in causing immeasurable damage.

    Wherever Jesus’ message has gone, life is better. It improves the position of women, of children, of minorities. It is the foundation of modern legal systems protecting the oppressed, of the modern scientific method, of human rights, of the welfare state.

    Jesus’ teaching is the supreme and purest explanation of the moral law.

    In his life we see it lived out. A life lived for others, without grasping riches, healing the sick, teaching the poor, accepting the stranger, purifying the unclean, forgiving the unrighteous, challenging the strong, dying for his friends.

    Jesus’ life is the supreme and purest demonstration of the moral law.

    And in his death and resurrection he takes our failure to do what we know we should and he bears its consequences. His infinite goodness, his moral perfection, is swapped with our failure. Every breach of the law has a consequence. And he took mine.

    In its place he offered me his perfect obedience. It is this that brings us back into a right relationship with the lawgiver. The breach is repaired and we are made right with him.

    This is the distinctive claim of Christianity. And it is really good news.

    Conclusion

    So can you be good without God? No. 

    In fact, on our own we cannot be good at all.

    But in and through Jesus we can be forgiven and accepted anyway.

    1. In preparing this blog I am almost completely dependent not only on the Bible but on CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity. You need to read this. It’s one of the most influential books of the last 200 years. If you are wondering about Christianity, even if you are not sure and think you might not believe, you should read this book. ↩︎

    Hope for the Next Year

    This year why not be someone who knows hope, shows hope and shares hope?

    Hope is powerful. Without hope people wither and die.

    One of the most frequent pictures that Scripture uses to describe the dynamic of hope we have in Jesus is light and darkness.

    “God”, St John says, “is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”1 He is light. That picture of light is brilliantly simple and yet rich and deep.

    It is in the nature of light that it goes out and includes others. Light radiates from a source and moves towards the other, enfolding and embracing it. It does not diminish that which it touches but rather allows it to be seen fully as it is, to become fully itself. It warms and energises.

    For this reason light is associated in the Bible with life and with love. To say that God is light is the flip-side of saying he is love: one who looks to the other, and brings them life, enabling them to be more fully themselves and more glorious than they could have been without him.

    But we can go further. For God to be light also implies that he is truth and freedom. Light illuminates – that is its essence. It makes known the truth about that which it touches.That in turn brings freedom for to choose freely we must first know the truth. And so we return to love. For what is love but the other, known and freely chosen?

    God is light. He is beauty and truth and freedom and above all love.
    Pause for a moment. This is an extraordinary claim. At the centre of existence is not the cold indifference of a mechanical universe blindly progressing from darkness to darkness. It is a person whose very being is light.

    Moreover, this light is not merely the source of existence but its end. In the beautiful picture of the destiny of all who love Jesus, John describes a city that “has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there.”2

    But if the centre of existence is light, why does the world experience such darkness?

    The possibility of darkness is the necessary implication of the ability to choose the light of freedom and love. God is perfect freedom and perfect love. To be able to choose both freedom and love is to accept the possibility of choosing darkness. Yet just as light, love, freedom and life go together so do darkness, sin, slavery and death. The world exercises the freedom of light to choose darkness and so finds that freedom removed. It rejects God who is freely chosen love and life and finds itself enslaved to sin and death. Such is the condition of humanity. It is fundamentally one without hope for the only hope of the slave is to be freed and yet freedom is the one good the slave cannot himself will or perhaps even imagine.

    To be in darkness is to be without hope. To offer light is first to demonstrate that there is another way to live – to understand that darkness is not the final condition of all humanity. That offer awakens the possibility of hope because it demonstrates that we need not live in the darkness of sin and death but can imagine ourselves becoming men and women of light and love.

    This is how St John begins his account of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection: “In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind… The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world.”3 As Christ comes into the world he brings with him hope that the darkness of sin, slavery and death will be destroyed in his light.

    “Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”4 This is the gospel. That within each of us lies a darkness of pain, shame, guilt, frustration and, ultimately, despair. And that in its place Jesus has come to fill us with light and, ultimately, with life.

    The challenge each of us face is whether we will receive that hope, to allow the light to remove our darkness and replace our death with his life. To do so is both sudden and slow. It comes like a flood when we open the shutters of our lives to him, when we are baptised and commit ourselves to following him. And yet there are still attic rooms shrouded in gloom which each of us need continually to open to the light – areas of bitterness or long-held grudges, of cherished abuses of our sexuality or prejudice against our brothers and sisters.

    To live in the light is a continual choice to reject darkness and embrace Christ.

    So where does this leave us as Christ’s Church? With the words we read earlier.

    Christ came as light into a world of darkness, the ultimate bearer of hope. And now he sends us in the same way.

    When Christ instructs us to be light, therefore, he is setting out our destiny – not merely to show up the failures of the world around us but rather to offer hope that the world need not live in darkness any longer; that slavery can be replaced by freedom, sin by love, despair by joy, the devil by God himself. To put this shortly, the light is Christ; when we become light we demonstrate the desirability of knowing Christ, generating the hope that there might be a different way; when we offer light we are offering the chance for that hope of a better future to be realised.

    The light that we bring is not, fundamentally, our own. It is not, in the final analysis, the hope of a society run well, of people who are kind, of men and women treated as equals, of a community of races, nationalities and ethnicities. All of these things are evidence of the presence of light. But the light they demonstrate is not their own; it is a reflection of Jesus. 

    Our work is to bring people to Christ; it is not merely to demonstrate a better way of living but to introduce them to the One who is himself life.This is how John’s words are fulfilled: “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”5 It continues to shine through us.

    What does this mean for us as we move into the year ahead?

    First, it means we need to know hope. In other words, to resolve to come increasingly to the light of God and allow that light increasingly to fill our lives. In practice, that might mean any of:

    • Getting baptised – going all in for Jesus. If you haven’t got baptised, that’s a bit like having those Christmas lights people put up that shine a picture onto the house. The light is there, some might get in through a window at some point, but basically the house is closed to the light. It is outside shining in where it can. If you haven’t put your trust in Jesus and got baptised yet, do.
    • Committing to prayer and reading Scripture, or fasting each week. Plan to build up your spiritual life in a named, accountable, achievable way.
    • Looking for acts of kindness first to other Christians and then to those outside. You could set yourself the goal of one selfless act of love for someone every week. Then increase it.

    Second, we need to show hope. Jesus said:

    “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others…”6

    We can do this as a group, opening our building to community services, looking for ways we can raise money to help good causes, seeking ways to improve our environment and care for creation. You will have better ideas than I do. Let’s share them. We want to be a light shining in this village, bringing hope to those whose experience of life is dark.

    Third, share hope. That quote from Jesus doesn’t finish with Christians doing good. It says we are to do good in order that people might come to worship the God who made them.

    “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”7

    A large part of the point of the good deeds is ultimately to bring people to worship. The light we shine is not our own; it is Christ’s. We let our light shine so that they can discover his light. Ultimately he is what people need.

    Sharing faith can feel hard or intimidating. But it doesn’t need to be. It could be as simple as:

    • Inviting a friend to come with you to a Life Group or Sunday service.
    • Resolving to pray for someone to know Jesus and then doing it every week.
    • Offering to pray with a friend or neighbour who is in distress.
    • Inviting someone to Alpha.

    It feels scary but it shouldn’t. Jesus is good. Church is good. Light and life are good. And everyone deserves to know them.

    1. 1 John 1:5. ↩︎
    2. Rev. 21:23-27 ↩︎
    3. John 1:4, 9 ↩︎
    4. John 8:12 ↩︎
    5. John 1:5. ↩︎
    6. Matthew 5:14-16 ↩︎
    7. Matthew 5:14-16 ↩︎

    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]

    Christian Social Ethics 1: Christians and the Environment

    How do Christians think about the ethics and politics of the environment? By caring for and using creation with love for one another and respect for God.

    Christians should care for and use creation with love for one another and respect for God.

    Introduction

    Often when we come to talk about ethics- how we should behave or treat one another- we focus on the very personal (such as how should I treat the neighbour I don’t get on with?).

    For the next few weeks, however, I want to take a step back and think about how the Bible and the Church speak to the big questions we face.1

    The Church has a long and beautiful history of thinking and teaching about how we should view social issues – how we should think about the environment, about the value and dignity of life, about care for the poor or work or the family. These are big questions that we need to learn to think about from God’s perspective and then to act, pray or vote in accordance with what we believe to be in accordance with the way God views the issue rather than the tradition, prejudices or perspectives we inherit or absorb from others. 

    Before we start, I want to give a health warning.

    Christian social teaching does not fit neatly into our political categories. Sometimes it might sound left-ish, sometimes right-ish. It sits in the middle or, more precisely, embraces and challenges them both.

    My aim is not to tell you how to vote or anything like it. Rather I want to suggest the types of questions we should be asking of our politicians and proposing some of the values we can use to evaluate their answers.

    More profoundly, however, questions of creation care, race or care for the poor are not just political, they are deeply personal. One of the most important principles in Christian social teaching is that solutions should always be as local and personal as possible – we are first of all asking not “what should the government do?” but “what can I do?”

    This week I want to think about how the Bible and the Church help us to understand how we should relate to it and, in particular, what it means for us to be stewards of creation.

    1. The Heart of Christian Teaching

    How things go wrong

    Human attitudes to Creation go wrong in two ways.

    First we can have too high a view of nature. At its most extreme this takes the form of a paganism that worships nature as a God. More often in the modern world this distortion tends to place care for the environment as the highest good, above the welfare of human beings or anything else. 

    This attitude can tend to lead to a knee-jerk hostility to development or scientific progress. In its more extreme forms it explicitly prioritises ideas or policy solutions that are anti- human for the sake of being pro-environment.

    All of these distortions here at their heart the error of valuing creation too highly – of making the created world on the same or higher level as its Creator.

    In the opposite direction we can have too low a view of the natural world. Here creation is not worshipped but despised. Its value is found solely in its usefulness to humanity rather than being worthy of love and care for its own sake. It is significant and worthy of care only if, and to the extent that, we can use it to make our lives more pleasurable.

    This attitude can lead to an uncritical consumerism and expansion, seeing the natural world as a resource to be exploited for human convenience or luxury. 

    These distortions have at their heart too high a view of humanity-as separate from, and lord of, creation and too dismissive a view of the created world itself.

    The Christian Perspective

    All Christian approaches to creation begin from the idea that God made the world and it is good. It is valuable not because it is useful to us but because God made it and he loves it. It is intrinsically good.

    Yet the fact that the world is created also means that it is not God. The environment, the natural world, is not the ultimate end or good – it is something that was made by God and it exists to serve him.

    God made human beings as part of that creation, formed from within it. In the beautiful picture of Genesis 2, God takes the stuff he has made and uses that stuff to make people. We aren’t separate from nature or the environment; we came from it. 

    And yet we are also different from it. Humans are set apart from the rest of Creation. They are, in a sense, higher than all of the other things he has made. He sets them apart as made in his image. He breathes his life into them.

    Pausing there, isn’t it amusing how accurate the poetry of Scripture captures who human beings are?  At once the dust of the earth and yet also bearing the print of heaven.

    Creation is given to humanity to use. Human life is of greater value than anything else in the world. In that sense it serves them. Yet they are given it to use as stewards, nurturing it, caring for it and bringing it to a sustainable life. We don’t own the created world-it has been entrusted to us and, while we are entitled to use and develop it, we will have to account to its the Owner for how we do so.

    1. The Implications of the Teaching for Ethical Judgments

    What does this mean for us as we think about how we shall treat the world?

    We should be willing to use the world around us to sustain and develop human life. It is good to do so. Part of the foundations of modern science was the Christian insight that the world is not God and therefore we can experiment on it. There is a hierarchy in creation in which human beings are at the top, with the privileges and responsibilities that implies.

    However,  we should always be suspicious of behaviour or policies that become exploitative or unnecessarily exploitative. We should be careful to avoid destructive behaviour, particularly where it is driven not by need but by greed, for the desire for “more” that can never fully be satisfied.

      So how do we apply this as voters, as churches and as individuals?

      As Voters

      When Christians are thinking about creation care and environmental issues as they consider who to vote for, or how to lobby, they should be asking these sorts of questions:

      • How will this party or person’s policies affect the natural world? This is a bigger question than just setting targets etc. It involves a wisdom judgement about what is actually prudent or workable.
      • What is the human cost of these policies? Is it justifiable given that human lives are the highest priority?

      As a Church

      As a church we should be asking how we can care for our environment. That is everything from not being unnecessarily wasteful to considering whether together we can care for the natural world of our village or locality in some way. It is part of good stewardship and it is also a good witness to Jesus.

      As Individuals

      Finally as individuals we can take steps in our own lives to be good stewards. It is tempting to get caught up shouting, posting or campaigning about things that are remote and ultimately need other people to take action for us. But what about nurturing and managing a garden? Or litter picking on your road? Or trying to walk instead of driving?

      These aren’t the exciting or fashionable things to do but they are all acts of faith and obedience, caring for the Creation and carrying out God’s command.

      A Prayer

      Here’s a prayer to get you started this week:

      God our Father and Creator, 

      Your glory is expressed in the light of the stars, the roar of ocean waves, and the majesty of mountains. You have created a home for us in the goodness of the earth and have provided for us through its resources. Give us a right and proper attitude in our relationship with creation. Give us wisdom to build a culture that reverences nature and its resources, that preserves it for the sake of future generations, and that prioritises the good of all in what we make and how we consume. May we reach out to you, our Creator, through a right relationship with your creation. May wonder and discovery lead to innovation that glorifies you, reverence for the dignity of human life, and respect for goodness of the earth that you have made. 

      In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

      1. These ideas are found throughout the Christian Tradition. For these articles, however, I’ve found the materials published by Ascension Press on Catholic Social Teaching (these ideas as they have developed in a Catholic context) very helpful. The prayers are taken directly from their course entitled Connected: Catholic Social Teaching for This Generation. ↩︎

      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. 

      Be More St George…

      The way of St George is not one of slaying dragons but of giving ourselves for others and for God. This is a path all of us can choose.

      In honour of the patron Saint of England, here’s some reflections on the life of the actual St George.

      People who have days named for them have to be remarkable. Their lives have to be significant – to point to something or someone bigger than them. St George was no exception.

      He lived about 1700 years ago and for most of his life was pretty successful. He had money and property. He was a brilliant soldier and was loved by Caesar, the Emperor and leader of most of the world.

      Then he seemed to throw it all away. And yet in the process achieved greatness.

      The Emperor started to attack and punish Christians. When he heard about this George publicly revealed that he followed Jesus and started to tell people about how Jesus had come back from the dead and could give those who trusted him new life.

      George sold all that he had and gave all his money to help the poor.

      This was not a good career move, to say the least. If you’ll pardon the expression, all hell broke loose. Here was one of the top soldiers in the Roman army publicly defying the emperor and the law.

      The Emperor was not having any of this so he tried to get him to say he didn’t believe in Jesus. First he offered him good things like a better job and money if he would deny Jesus. Then, when that didn’t work he hurt him very badly and did all kinds of horrible things. George kept on saying no – he believed Jesus had come back from the dead & had given him a new life.

      So they went on torturing George and still he wouldn’t do what they wanted.

      Things were getting pretty embarrassing for the Emperor. Worse still, when others saw George’s his example – how he loved others and gave his money to help them, how he loved Jesus and wouldn’t deny him – they became Christians too. Eventually even the Emperor’s own wife became a Christian. Eventually it all got too much and they killed George.

      But not before his life had become so important that the church started to celebrate a day in his memory which we still celebrate today – the day he died.

      So why celebrate?

      George’s life is important for what it points to.

      Greatness is found not in the path of Caesar but after the example of George. It consists not on obtaining what we can for ourselves, but in giving ourselves for others; not in living for this life but for eternity; not in following the path of popularity and temporary power but of the crucified Christ.

      George found greatness, and changed the world around him, by serving God and pointing people to Jesus. He appeared to fail yet 1700 years after his death the Emperor who had him killed is largely forgotten George is remembered around the world.

      The way of St George is not one of slaying dragons but of giving ourselves for others and for God.

      This is a path all of us can choose. We can choose what we do with our lives, choose the men and women we want to be. We can choose greatness

      Choose to love God and love others – that is the path to a truly great life.

      Do We Still Need Pastors and Priests?

      Faith, and the pastors and priests who embody it, not only remain relevant, in our current age they are essential.

      Do we still need pastors and priests? Or has our society progressed made such people and posts irrelevant or actively harmful. It’s a question I think about a lot both as a pastor/priest myself and as I watch many of my colleagues struggling with a crisis of calling or identity, scrabbling for relevance to other disciplines or professionals.

      To this question, Joseph Ratzinger gives a rallying cry: faith, and the pastors and priests who embody it, not only remain relevant, in our current age they are essential.

      The shadows are becoming longer, the loneliness— more profound, and the question of those who remain— more difficult: What sort of a future do they face? Does it still make sense to become a priest in a world in which only technological and social progress matters now? Does faith have a future? Is it worthwhile to stake one’s whole life on this card? Is priesthood not an outdated relic from the past that no one needs anymore, whereas all our efforts should be applied to eradicating poverty and furthering progress?

      But is all that really the case? Or is mankind, by running the machine of progress faster and faster, not at the same time rushing into suicidal insanity? The famous French aviator Antoine de Saint- Exupéry once wrote in a letter to a general: “There is only one problem in the world. How can we restore to man a spiritual significance, a spiritual discontent; let something descend upon them like the dew of a Gregorian chant. Don’t you see, we cannot live any longer on refrigerators, politics, balance sheets, and crossword puzzles. We just cannot.” And in his book The Little Prince, he says: How uncomprehending the world of adults, of clever people is. By now we understand only machines, geography, and politics. But the really important things, the light, the clouds, heaven and its stars, we no longer understand. And the great Russian author Solzhenitsyn records the cry of distress of a Communist who landed in Stalin’s prisons: We could use cathedrals in Russia again and men whose pure life makes these cathedrals alive and turns them into a space for the soul. Indeed, man does not live by refrigerators and balance sheets alone. The more he tries to do that, the more desperate he becomes, the emptier his life is. We need even today, and today more than ever, people who do not sell luxury items and do not make political propaganda but, rather, ask about the soul of a man and help him not to lose his soul in the tumult of everyday routine. The scarcer priests become in the world of business and politics, the more we need them.

      Joseph Ratzinger, Teaching and Learning the Love of God, p.207-8