I was recently talking to a friend whose 19 year old daughter is at present in Australia for a three month period. The daughter wanted work. She started knocking on doors. She eventually came up to a house where help was indeed required. She was taken on for three weeks only, but at the end of that three weeks she had proven herself such that she was offered work for as long as she wanted it. I was impressed. What an ancient, cumbersome method, and wow, it worked. I have so much respect for that short and otherwise unremarkable 19 year old. What a woman! The world is before her, and she will make that world work for her. She went out without references, without a job agency, without an employment scheme, merely with her guts and willingness to work.
As I write two days ago there was an excellent presentation at a deanery synod meeting, that is for a meeting of church representatives from the London Borough of Redbridge done by Revd. Paul Harcourt of Woodford Wells. He spoke about discipleship and the need to physically tell the Gospel to people, to physically do something that was outgoing and risky. We broke up into groups and discussed the presentation and at the end of the session we had feedback from the different groups. Our group reduced the ‘dynamic going out’ to ‘welcoming people to church’. And our group was not the only group that reduced it to this. In summing up the various groups the leader spoke of ‘going on a course’. So this is the line of travel, dynamic going out, welcoming people to church, going on a course. It is as if soldiers in Afghanistan shortly asked to go on patrol in enemy territory were asked if they might prefer to wait for the Taliban to come in and have a chat! And in the meantime, someone else suggested a course on Islamic correct speech!
At the end of the meeting I wanted to read Jeremiah, and say a word of judgment, but thought better of it. After all in the Church of England the last thing we want is to upset people. So go on. We reduce the campaign to a farce. Perhaps two or three people might do the course and they can tell others that it’s quite alright to say at home and the Taliban better golly well watch out! This ought not to be funny. It’s not funny. It’s ridiculous, and yet it tells us more about modern Christianity, modern Anglicanism, that anything else I know. We have become masters of the tea and biscuit rota and precious little else. We are no longer a fighting force, and no matter that we are now planning, seriously planning, for downsizing and reductions in clergy as we can no longer justify the amount of paid staff we have given the fall off of or aging membership.
Let’s take a phrase like ‘telling Jesus’. We can all write it down, and find it meaningful. One can read it as me telling Jesus something or other, perhaps even me telling of Jesus to another, and at a further extension Jesus telling me something or other. That’s three different senses, radically different from the same words. One person means ‘b’, another understands ‘a’ or ‘c’. Most positively refuse to understand it as it is meant. For us ‘telling Jesus’ is ‘smiling at a new comer in church’. That is certainly how I read the response to a presentation that could be so misinterpreted as to destroy its meaning.
So we read in the scriptures of judgment, and what do we do? We anaesthetise it. We tone it down, and make of the campaign to fight the Taliban a trip to Sainsbury’s to buy the table cloths to make the church as welcoming as possible. We read: ‘Let he who would follow me take up his cross’, and we make the cross into an ornate fashion accruement. We turn execution and torture, suffering and death, into ebony and ivory and whistle a nice tune. Why? Because we can cope with the latter but not the former.
Here I am going to say something extremely positive. The Upper Room, supported my many people at Holy Trinity, is a real attempt to spread the Gospel and not a fudge, nor an excuse. Some of our members have even gone along George lane and given out cards welcoming people. We had a large donation too by a member to fund the work of the Upper Room. I hope we can get flyers printed that could be given out to spread the Gospel. We say, come to a nice cosy room, have a chat and a cup of tea, and we will share the Gospel with you. We won’t mince our words. We won’t be politically correct, we will tell it as it always was and it always will be. Take it or leave it! And we will pray together for the spirit of God to touch us and transform us. We will demand of the Lord that he will use us and not let us lie fallow until the day of Judgment.
Recently on Desert Island Discs Kirsty Young interviewed Alan Murray. He had run away from an Orphanage to join the French Foreign Legion where he served for five years. He walked with a friend to the South Pole and various other adventures. He started up a business venture in Asia and became a millionaire. He was asked to sum up his life. He thought for a while and said: “Some people dream and ask ‘why’? I dream and ask ‘why not!’.
Isn’t it time we followed suit? Why not visit the Upper Room and see what is happening? Why not come on Thursdays and pray with us. We knell on the floor and pray, and we ask God to anoint us. You know, maybe he will! And if you are not there, and Pentecost does come, think what you will miss!
The Upper Room is open every day from 2.00pm to 4.00pm and everybody is welcome.
Father Robert
March 2010
Read Previous Articles: February 09 / March 09
