Thursday 26 March 2015
Roots and Shoots in growing the Kingdom of God
Capitalism. It is the ocean we swim in, whether we like it or not. The Darwinian business and economic model is so entrenched in the world system that it seems a Christian business is almost a contradiction in terms.
But God desires growth: His Kingdom come is not some naive wish-fulfilment but a real and concrete growth in righteousness in every area and relation. He takes the broken things in the world and redeems them to something beautiful, and scripture (especially places like Malachi) warns and threatens against immoral use of wealth and growing monopoly. The warning has an aim: that His people should TURN from those practises to something more in line with His Kingdom purposes, more in line with His character, more in line with imago Dei. To stop what they are doing, and generally to do the opposite.
I know that, in Morecambe as in a great many other places, hope is hard to come by when your highest legitimate aim is to join the ranks of the working poor. This might be why so many people live week to week on the pounds worth of hope that the lottery provides. It, along with other forms of gambling, offers the hope not just of a limited burst of pleasure, but a radical change of lifestyle. It is, of course, a false hope. Statistically you are more likely to be hit by a lightening bolt, and it doesn't take much research to unearth the sad tales of those who have won but not prospered by it. This limited achievable aspiration leads to many looking to less legitimate ways of raising their game: simply put, crime does pay, as anyone who knows a local drug-dealer can see. Money, cars and fresh clothes, if not lasting security.
Our God is the King of hope though, a lasting hope. One that starts as small as a mustard seed but grows continually until eternal life. The certainty of things unseen. So what hope can He bring to Morecambe, in real, measurable and practical ways, or indeed to any area of the world? Mercy ministry? Yes, sure. But that is not enough. In Proverbs it says "there is much profit in the fallow land of the poor, but injustice sweeps it away". We as Christians are not just to feed the hungry, but to bring about justice for the poor. The fact that this country even has a label for "the working poor" is a shame on us. Our government subsidises Big Business in the form of tax credits: ensuring that corporations don't need to worry about their workers starving, and maximising their profit margin through tax-payer support of their negligently poor wages.
Christians need to offer a realistic alternative to this. We have to see business as mission; wealth creation a purposeful blessing to be shared; profit for the community rather than from it.
This is something I am presently trying to get to grips with, as we need, as a house, as a 'project', for lack of a better word, some more structure within which our church family can grow. We need jobs for the jobless, purpose and vision and hope, encouraging entrepreneurship, growth and giving people more to aim for than yet another temporary, part-time, minimum wage, zero-hour or unlimited hour contract nonsense. People need security. They need a row to hoe of their own. God gave each family in OT Israel their own land: they were to work it, blessing him for the increase, sparing what they could for the poor. How can we do that as Christians, so we are not simply sharing the good news that Christ came to save sinners, but showing something of the new heaven and new earth that will be ours through the perfect life, agonising death, and glorious resurrection of the Son of God. How can we both pray and act towards bringing the Kingdom of God here, in part and shadowed as it may be, now?
I will let you know what I find. More on this again I suspect!
But God desires growth: His Kingdom come is not some naive wish-fulfilment but a real and concrete growth in righteousness in every area and relation. He takes the broken things in the world and redeems them to something beautiful, and scripture (especially places like Malachi) warns and threatens against immoral use of wealth and growing monopoly. The warning has an aim: that His people should TURN from those practises to something more in line with His Kingdom purposes, more in line with His character, more in line with imago Dei. To stop what they are doing, and generally to do the opposite.
I know that, in Morecambe as in a great many other places, hope is hard to come by when your highest legitimate aim is to join the ranks of the working poor. This might be why so many people live week to week on the pounds worth of hope that the lottery provides. It, along with other forms of gambling, offers the hope not just of a limited burst of pleasure, but a radical change of lifestyle. It is, of course, a false hope. Statistically you are more likely to be hit by a lightening bolt, and it doesn't take much research to unearth the sad tales of those who have won but not prospered by it. This limited achievable aspiration leads to many looking to less legitimate ways of raising their game: simply put, crime does pay, as anyone who knows a local drug-dealer can see. Money, cars and fresh clothes, if not lasting security.
Our God is the King of hope though, a lasting hope. One that starts as small as a mustard seed but grows continually until eternal life. The certainty of things unseen. So what hope can He bring to Morecambe, in real, measurable and practical ways, or indeed to any area of the world? Mercy ministry? Yes, sure. But that is not enough. In Proverbs it says "there is much profit in the fallow land of the poor, but injustice sweeps it away". We as Christians are not just to feed the hungry, but to bring about justice for the poor. The fact that this country even has a label for "the working poor" is a shame on us. Our government subsidises Big Business in the form of tax credits: ensuring that corporations don't need to worry about their workers starving, and maximising their profit margin through tax-payer support of their negligently poor wages.
Christians need to offer a realistic alternative to this. We have to see business as mission; wealth creation a purposeful blessing to be shared; profit for the community rather than from it.
This is something I am presently trying to get to grips with, as we need, as a house, as a 'project', for lack of a better word, some more structure within which our church family can grow. We need jobs for the jobless, purpose and vision and hope, encouraging entrepreneurship, growth and giving people more to aim for than yet another temporary, part-time, minimum wage, zero-hour or unlimited hour contract nonsense. People need security. They need a row to hoe of their own. God gave each family in OT Israel their own land: they were to work it, blessing him for the increase, sparing what they could for the poor. How can we do that as Christians, so we are not simply sharing the good news that Christ came to save sinners, but showing something of the new heaven and new earth that will be ours through the perfect life, agonising death, and glorious resurrection of the Son of God. How can we both pray and act towards bringing the Kingdom of God here, in part and shadowed as it may be, now?
I will let you know what I find. More on this again I suspect!
Thursday 19 March 2015
interesting article
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/06/25/has-capitalism-become-incompatible-with-christianity/morality-should-not-be-priced-in-the-marketplace
This is a topic that I am wrestling through at the moment. The world, dropping rapidly into the bed it has made, and the Christian neo-Con right seem to be attempting to salvage something God hates: not profit per-se but the inordinate pursuit of it, the maximizing rather than the optimizing of profit. What does a Christian Business ethic look like in opposition to the corporate model responsible for so much inequality and pain look like? How do we make all this nonsense look as ridiculous and self-defeating as it actually is? This is a brief article I found interesting, from a secular point of view.Monday 16 March 2015
Where we have come from part 3.
Flash forward several years: my wife and I are commuting to a church plant in Morecambe (a place I formerly loathed as I saw the worst it had to offer as a bin man in the area, battering my way up and down filthy back alleys, but now Christ has worked a deep and real love into my soul for the place and the people who call it home). I was coming back from a leaders meeting and felt a real sense of pressure, or 'burden' in Christianese, to pray for more detail about the vision God had given me all those years ago. I prayed a long time, deep into the morning hours, and felt a strong sense of direction in a more specific way than I ever had before.
I went after work to share with my good friend and pastor, Richard Scholes, what I felt God had put in my heart and mind: a shared house where people, disconnected from family or from dysfunctional and destructive family backgrounds, could come and be a part of our family and the wider church family. Richard was not home, but his wife was, so I described this renewed vision to her. No sooner had I finished my speechifying than Richard walks in.
He had just come from a meeting with a young man of our church who desperately wanted help to move on from destructive cycles. He had asked if it were possible for him to move in with any church family that might take him. Richard mused "woulden't it be great if there were a place like that, a family home where people could move in and be discipled in a family context?"
I nearly fell of my chair at this confirmation from God that I was not mad (okay, not just mad. Okay, not isolated in my madness).
If God tells you something, share it with others. Many people will try to put you off, but I do believe that when it is His will, He will encourage, nurture and provide for His Kingdom growth.
I went after work to share with my good friend and pastor, Richard Scholes, what I felt God had put in my heart and mind: a shared house where people, disconnected from family or from dysfunctional and destructive family backgrounds, could come and be a part of our family and the wider church family. Richard was not home, but his wife was, so I described this renewed vision to her. No sooner had I finished my speechifying than Richard walks in.
He had just come from a meeting with a young man of our church who desperately wanted help to move on from destructive cycles. He had asked if it were possible for him to move in with any church family that might take him. Richard mused "woulden't it be great if there were a place like that, a family home where people could move in and be discipled in a family context?"
I nearly fell of my chair at this confirmation from God that I was not mad (okay, not just mad. Okay, not isolated in my madness).
If God tells you something, share it with others. Many people will try to put you off, but I do believe that when it is His will, He will encourage, nurture and provide for His Kingdom growth.
Friday 13 March 2015
Where we have come from Part 2
We were, at one point in our tempestuous history as a family, homeless. Don't get me wrong: not the 'living on the streets, begging for food, sheltering under an overpass' kind of homeless. We were sheltered by the family we inherited as part of joining God's Kingdom, church family, family by The Blood rather than blood family. With two kids, both under three, it was not an easy time, but I don't want to make out it was that difficult either. It was the discomfort of close community, of being guests, of having no space to call your own, of uncertainty and anxiety about the future and the pride-breaking charity of others. It was good in the way that the gym is good: hard work, discomfort and results you cant see immediately but you feel down deep in the fiber of your muscles.
During this time I was confused and not a little dismayed. We looked at housing but my wage only allowed us to consider places that literally made my wife cry. Dripping, black and furry damp, cold with no internal heating, single glazed windows where the breeze visibly lifted the curtains when the window was shut Not good.
So I went out one day on the farm we were staying at, took my Bible and, like Jacob, said to God "I'm not moving till you bless me", sitting down and struggling in prayer as I asked God what He wanted me to do. An hour passed, then two, and all I was getting was bone cold and further discouraged. I attempted to build a kind of alter, realizing as it collapsed that I was still trying to do something to reccomend myself, my cause, to God. To blackmail Him really. Finally I surrendered, sat, opened my Bible and read, ignoring my own voice, ignoring the doubts and fears that battled with my faith. I read and read. Another hour passed.
But by now I was not seeking God for what He could do for me. Nor was I trying to recommend myself to Him with my actions. I was just seeking His face, seeking Him for Him.
At that point, 7 years ago, he asked me clearly what I wanted, then gave me a vision for "a house of many rooms, that The LORD would build, where the orphan would find sanctuary". His vision, my heart's desire.
This did not answer my questions. It did not get me and my family a home of our own immediately. It seemed impossible. But He spoke, and the rest became suddenly less important.
We have been praying about this vision ever since then. Asked others to pray. Asked Him to bring about what He said He would, never moving a step in our own strength to attempt to make it happe, as we had no strength to bring it about without His action on our behalf.
Now I sit in a 'Kingdom built' house, many roomed, and one we hope to make a peaceful place where anyone abandoned by family can find new family. We offer it as sanctuary.
And this is just the beginning.
During this time I was confused and not a little dismayed. We looked at housing but my wage only allowed us to consider places that literally made my wife cry. Dripping, black and furry damp, cold with no internal heating, single glazed windows where the breeze visibly lifted the curtains when the window was shut Not good.
So I went out one day on the farm we were staying at, took my Bible and, like Jacob, said to God "I'm not moving till you bless me", sitting down and struggling in prayer as I asked God what He wanted me to do. An hour passed, then two, and all I was getting was bone cold and further discouraged. I attempted to build a kind of alter, realizing as it collapsed that I was still trying to do something to reccomend myself, my cause, to God. To blackmail Him really. Finally I surrendered, sat, opened my Bible and read, ignoring my own voice, ignoring the doubts and fears that battled with my faith. I read and read. Another hour passed.
But by now I was not seeking God for what He could do for me. Nor was I trying to recommend myself to Him with my actions. I was just seeking His face, seeking Him for Him.
At that point, 7 years ago, he asked me clearly what I wanted, then gave me a vision for "a house of many rooms, that The LORD would build, where the orphan would find sanctuary". His vision, my heart's desire.
This did not answer my questions. It did not get me and my family a home of our own immediately. It seemed impossible. But He spoke, and the rest became suddenly less important.
We have been praying about this vision ever since then. Asked others to pray. Asked Him to bring about what He said He would, never moving a step in our own strength to attempt to make it happe, as we had no strength to bring it about without His action on our behalf.
Now I sit in a 'Kingdom built' house, many roomed, and one we hope to make a peaceful place where anyone abandoned by family can find new family. We offer it as sanctuary.
And this is just the beginning.
Monday 2 March 2015
Where we have come from pt 1
We have been privileged to "stand on the shoulders of giants": to be a part of this vision is to be a part of something that has been seeded a long time before we arrived on the scene in the hearts of others, others who had their own vision and goals blocked in the will of God so that we could see their prayers answered through us.
A recent visitor to (and, hopefully eventual, member of) HomeChurch has been a long time lover of Morecambe. Committed to the cause of Christ, His kingdom come, and the people of Morecambe, she and a few others from various churches in the Morecambe area used to meet up to pray for the city and it's inhabitants. They wanted to open a place where people without a family could be a part of a family: the family of God. They prayed to this end for a long while, and looked at the very house we now live in, hearing from God that it would be a place of discipleship, love and spiritual growth. they attempted to buy the place, even put in an offer to it's owners around 2012, but for one reason and another the whole thing fell through.
I can imagine what that felt like. I may be guilty of ascribing my own experience to others, but it is not hard to imagine them feeling let down, even hurt by God, and possibly angry at themselves. "He said it! Did I hear Him wrong? was I imagining it? Why would He point to something and not deliver? What did we do wrong? Have we failed?
I'm not sure any of these questions are wrong questions, as long as they are asked directly of God and not grumbled at His people. We can be guilty, like the children of Israel in the desert, of complaining about God, rather than dialoguing WITH Him. All of the Christian walk boils down to relationships. Us to Him, Him to us, us to others. When we put the relationships in the wrong order we end up with various kinds of very destructive sins: gossip is taking a one another relationship and spreading it across to other people, but gossip against God, grumbling and complaining, is taking the us/God relationship and spreading it to others in the same way. The questions we have of God should be shared privately with God and our anger dealt with. Some of this is contained in the LORD's prayer: Your Kingdom come, Your will be done is a statement that implies my will is secondary to the all encompassing purpose of the "hallowing", or showing as awesome, holy and righteous, of His name. Sharing one's own will with God is a part of the process, but only the beginning. It is sharing and allowing His sufficiency, His good, perfect and pleasing will, to overcome our own feeble empire building.
I am glad that those faithful folk submitted to His will. What He promised He has delivered, and not because of anything better or more significant about us, but because it pleased Him to do so, and His will is the hope of the nations. Every endeavor we pursue in the cause of Christ is surfing on the back of another's faithful prayer and service: we have been privileged to see that. Many, the Bible says, do not see the fruit of their faithfulness, the promises of God come to be. remember they are no less blessed for it, for everything done in secret will be made known, and many who are last shall be first. Let us remember that the next time we confuse our worldly success of perceived failure with the blessing or disfavour of God. God does not promise our own dreams will come true, but that He will place us in the middle of His dream: a world of saved sinners, made saints by His blood, a world of love, peace and joy, a world that can only be fully realized at His return, but a heaven that invades earth in the here and now as we live before Him in humility and repentance. A good dream. A revolutionary dream.
Who wants to be a part of that?
A recent visitor to (and, hopefully eventual, member of) HomeChurch has been a long time lover of Morecambe. Committed to the cause of Christ, His kingdom come, and the people of Morecambe, she and a few others from various churches in the Morecambe area used to meet up to pray for the city and it's inhabitants. They wanted to open a place where people without a family could be a part of a family: the family of God. They prayed to this end for a long while, and looked at the very house we now live in, hearing from God that it would be a place of discipleship, love and spiritual growth. they attempted to buy the place, even put in an offer to it's owners around 2012, but for one reason and another the whole thing fell through.
I can imagine what that felt like. I may be guilty of ascribing my own experience to others, but it is not hard to imagine them feeling let down, even hurt by God, and possibly angry at themselves. "He said it! Did I hear Him wrong? was I imagining it? Why would He point to something and not deliver? What did we do wrong? Have we failed?
I'm not sure any of these questions are wrong questions, as long as they are asked directly of God and not grumbled at His people. We can be guilty, like the children of Israel in the desert, of complaining about God, rather than dialoguing WITH Him. All of the Christian walk boils down to relationships. Us to Him, Him to us, us to others. When we put the relationships in the wrong order we end up with various kinds of very destructive sins: gossip is taking a one another relationship and spreading it across to other people, but gossip against God, grumbling and complaining, is taking the us/God relationship and spreading it to others in the same way. The questions we have of God should be shared privately with God and our anger dealt with. Some of this is contained in the LORD's prayer: Your Kingdom come, Your will be done is a statement that implies my will is secondary to the all encompassing purpose of the "hallowing", or showing as awesome, holy and righteous, of His name. Sharing one's own will with God is a part of the process, but only the beginning. It is sharing and allowing His sufficiency, His good, perfect and pleasing will, to overcome our own feeble empire building.
I am glad that those faithful folk submitted to His will. What He promised He has delivered, and not because of anything better or more significant about us, but because it pleased Him to do so, and His will is the hope of the nations. Every endeavor we pursue in the cause of Christ is surfing on the back of another's faithful prayer and service: we have been privileged to see that. Many, the Bible says, do not see the fruit of their faithfulness, the promises of God come to be. remember they are no less blessed for it, for everything done in secret will be made known, and many who are last shall be first. Let us remember that the next time we confuse our worldly success of perceived failure with the blessing or disfavour of God. God does not promise our own dreams will come true, but that He will place us in the middle of His dream: a world of saved sinners, made saints by His blood, a world of love, peace and joy, a world that can only be fully realized at His return, but a heaven that invades earth in the here and now as we live before Him in humility and repentance. A good dream. A revolutionary dream.
Who wants to be a part of that?
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