God  IS an old person in the sky... and I’m glad

    A few years ago, when people actually cared what God might be like, it was common to mock some of the caricatures of God.  Caricatures for which Christianity was, sadly, probably responsible: - a powerless softy, the unsympathetic Judge, a cosmic Policeman, and an old man in the clouds. And yes, probably out of frustration, I mocked these perceptions.  I still don’t like the first three but I’ve come to love the “old person in the sky”... because I’m now a grandad.  Well, a “poppa” actually.  And if having kids of my own years ago gave me a better understanding of God as parent, being a grandparent is now transforming my connection with God.

     Earlier, six-month old Semisi lay on my chest and fell asleep.  I listened to his breathing - initially he was taking at least two for one of mine but slowly he relaxed and drifted off to sleep.  Presumably because he felt secure with Poppa.  And so he should.  Not because I’m any great shakes in the grandparent department, but because it’s a lot different than being a parent.   When I was a novice dad I worried about a whole heap of stuff, particularly about how my kids would turn out. 

     Frankly I now think the whole parenting thing is over-researched, over-scrutinised, and over-regulated.  What I’ve worked out is that if you wholeheartedly love your kids, give them some boundaries, and model even inadequate attempts at service and caring for others... most of them will turn out fine. So I’m way more relaxed as a grandfather.  Even when my two-year olds turn on a tantrum and give me the grumpy cold shoulder. I love them even more.  They’re doing exactly what 2yr-olds sometimes do.  So I do what Poppas are meant to do – chuckle, relax, and wait for the hugs that will eventually come.

     I think we get to pick what kind of God we believe in.  The Bible, just like most religious texts, presents a range of perspectives on God.  Some of my evangelical friends vote for the judgmental, slightly mean God.  Not me.  I love the old person in the sky ... who sees a bigger picture than I can, who knows the Cross took care of sin and that eventually things will work out.  Whose breathing is a lot more relaxed than mine.  And who wants me to rest.

   Sleep on Semisi.  I love you more than you know.

Last week I turned my back on Jesus

   Last week I turned my back on Jesus...twice...in the same day.  Once is bad enough but twice, just three hours apart.  What can you say?  Yeah, I know that claiming to have seen Jesus on a busy street in India is much the same as saying I saw Elvis at the Eketahuna Races.  But trust me... it was Jesus.  Both times. 

   The first was while stuck in one of Chennai’s interminable traffic jams.  40 degrees, A/C on full, going nowhere.  Jesus looked about 83.  Having survived crucifixion, the intervening years had obviously been spent in the sun and dust of India.  The face was almost black, the beard was white.  Stooped posture.  Ragged clothes.  Walking staff.  Ratty sandals.  He looked at me sitting in the back seat of a new Honda.  He wasn’t begging, just eyes that enquired if I was at all interested in connecting. I turned away and continued the conversation with my companions, until Jesus moved on. 

   A few hours later Jesus turned up again.  This time it was the baby Jesus, carried on the hip of the Virgin Mary.  No renaissance style beatific smile here.  More a pitiful pleading.  Tapping on the window.  Begging for food.  Again I turned away.  I could have prayed for the tapping to stop but how stupid a prayer would that have been?  And who to?  Thankfully the lights turned green, Mary’s fingers scraped down the side of the car, and I was gone.  

   I turned my back on Jesus last week.  I’m obviously not a Christian, or Jesus follower, or whatever current term is in vogue. I did wonder how the five Christians I was with coped, as an hour later the waiter cleared away our uneaten leftovers from lunch.  But that doesn’t  make my issue any easier. 

   My problem is that I turned my back on Jesus last week.  I can’t be a Christian, I’m not even a decent human being.

GET YOUR KIDS OUT OF CHURCH
   I get to hang out with tired Christians.  Lots of them.  Good people.  Years of passionate Christian service under their spiritual belts.  Not apathetic.  Not self-centred.  Definitely not stupid.  Mostly frustrated because their church involvement (the majority have spent all their lives in evangelical/pentecostal churches) is grinding their faith down.  Full of important questions that aren’t being honoured let alone answered. 
   The first part of the conversations usually revolve around how frustrated they are.  If I direct the dialogue towards Jesus it’s obvious they still want the wonder of who Jesus was and is, to change the way they live.  But they can’t deny the frustration they feel at church.  At which point I ask them why they still go.  Seems a fair question to me.  If we’re to take responsibility for our own faith journey (rather than blame other people) why keep going to something that’s making it worse?    
   The answers always involve three things.  Firstly a sense that this is what God wants, based I suspect, on years of hearing a misuse of the verse “forsake not the gathering together...”, by leaders who have a vested interest in keeping people attending.  I find myself asking “seriously, you believe in the kind of God who wants you to keep turning up for inane worship and mind-numbing sermons?  That’s the kind of God you follow?”   Sadly for most, it is.  They have had years of indoctrination that God will be displeased if they stop walking in the door of his company buildings.  Maybe so displeased that he’ll eject them from whatever glorious after-life heaven may be.
   I understand this.  It was my reality for over 50 years.  A toxic and insulting view of God that slowly poisoned the reality of what God can be.  Must be.  If God is God he can’t be the intellectually challenged, relationally-deficient, insecure manipulator this view makes him out to be. 
  The second reason is 'teaching'.   “We need to learn about the Christian faith so we can be better at it”.  And so my next question is “and how’s that working out for you?”  Those who respond honestly say that it’s not. Not answering the important questions they have.  Not satisfying their search for a big story.  Not filling their hearts and heads with a greater sense of wonder.  Generally they find sermons and home group lessons are drilling so deep into the Bible they don't connect with real-life issues, or they are poor attempts at  being hip, regurgitating what the preacher heard at the latest “passionately afire” conference.
  But the third reason is the saddest of all.  Because the majority of people I talk about this stuff with are parents, they say “we keep going for the kids sake, we want them to learn about God.”  Say what?    You want them to be propagandised into the same fear-based religious tradition that has slowly poisoned you.  You want them to grow up with the same inadequate view of God?  And sadly, many of them do.  They feel if their kids can learn the Sunday School stories they did, go to the same church youth group activities, go forward at the same youth conference hype-sessions they did, get baptised... if they can get their kids through to the end of high school still going to church then they’ve done what God wants. 
   This ignores the fact that most of those kids will ditch the faith by the time they’re 20, and if they don’t by the time they are in their 30’s they’ll be exactly where their parents are – sitting in church afraid to let go, trust God, and launch out. So, for your kid’s sake, please get out!   
   What then you ask?  That’s for another blog.

WHY I WON’T BE GOING BACK TO CHURCH

  Sooner or later, in conversations about faith, I get asked why I don’t go to church.  After 55 years of regular attending, I stopped about 8 years ago, becoming one of the “Dones”, people who are ‘Done’ with church attending. Early on I was probably a bit defensive.  I would explain that the church is not something you ‘go to’, it is a mystical, hard-to-define collective that you are part of.  And I would point out the varied ways I continue to interact with believers.  Mostly this convinced no-one, and they would pursue the question “but where do you go to church?” At which point I gave up on the conversation. 

  During the last seven years I have attempted to keep civil and silent as many Christian leaders and commentators claimed the Dones are just the result of God sifting the church.  Getting rid of those who are uncommitted, nominal, lazy, or apathetic.  This of course is rubbish.  The majority of those leaving are strongly committed to keeping their faith, but like me, they’ve worked out all the years of attending have been unhelpful, and not because they are self-centred dissatisfied consumerists.  They have a passionate belief that connection with Jesus ought to be more than just another religious routine. 

   I’m grateful to Sara Miles, in her book City of God, for giving me a better ‘peg’ on which to hang my view of church.  In this fascinating book she talks about going to church only in so much as it allowed her to fall “precipitously in love with what God is doing in the world”.  To which I say a resounding Amen!  Most of my church experience made me acquainted with believers, and introduced me to the world of church politics and dissension.  Energy was taken up in trying to make church better.  But I don’t remember it increasing my love for all people – especially those ‘out there’.  Quite the opposite.  People of other faiths, migrants,  atheists, Satanists, gays ... all of those people were viewed as opponents to overcome.  In the name of love, of course. 

   It’s hard to put in words how liberating it is to have the time, and the opportunity, to discover how actively God is present in all those aforementioned ‘groups’.  In the last sermon I ever preached in church I stated my conviction that Jesus could be found at our local mosque.  That didn’t go down well.   But my freedom from the pervasive mindset at church has enabled me to start discovering how true the statement was. 

   Miles goes on to say she wants to “stand on the kind of sacred ground that isn’t curated by church professionals”.   Again I say Amen.  God is present, and doing sacred things, outside of church walls.  With people on the margins.  The fringes of society.  Discovering the extent of that is true joy.  Energising. Liberating. Faith building.  It’s what I was looking for.  And forsaking ‘church attendance’ enabled me to find it. 

Call me a "done" if you like, but I'm not going back.

EVANGELICALS HAVE KILLED EVANGELISM

   Some evangelical spokespeople blame liberals, emergents, hipster Christians, agenda-driven atheists, and gays... for the decline in (traditional, conservative) evangelism.  Sorry people, wrong target.  Having spent most of my 60-plus years in the conservative evangelical stream, I’d argue the culprit is us.  Not them.   We did it. 

  In a stunning piece of illogic, these same spokespeople often long for a return to the past.  As though ignoring the way the world has changed in the last 70 years, and recreating the flawed version of Christianity that was modern evangelism, will solve the problem.  That’s what happens though, when you point the finger at everything and everyone but yourself.  You mistakenly think that if you can get everyone to believe what you’ve always believed, the problem will be solved. 

   OK, so evangelicalism (and the evangelical churches that represent it) isn’t dead.  But the practise of evangelism that gave birth to it, that gave the movement identity, and expressed its theology, is.  

Evangelism’s heyday was post WW2, through to about the mid-80’s.  Forty glorious years.  Well, glorious if you were part of that version of Christianity, championed by organisations like the Billy Graham Association, Youth for Christ, Campus Crusade, YWAM, and Open Air Campaigners.  And by church-based “Decades of Evangelism”; by the spread of the charismatic movement into almost every denomination; and by nationwide revivals in places as diverse as central Africa, the Solomon Islands, and South America. 

   But it’s over.  If you doubt it, try organising an outreach event, a mission project, or even a small, local, Gospel-sharing activity.  Finding committed volunteers, resources, and dollars will leave you exhausted and dispirited, certainly in comparison with the abundance experienced in the 70’s.  Most Christians are just over it – suspicious of any request for money; full of doubt about the claims made about past evangelism successes and future possibilities; and just too busy doing life, to give their time. And they are increasingly uncertain about the theology that underpinned most evangelism.  All with good reason in my view.  Here’s just a few of my thoughts on why this has happened: 

  1.  Limited theology    Evangelism was built on the foundation of a narrow interpretation of the Bible that necessarily ignored contradictory passages of scripture.  For instance, the idea that “by grace are we saved, not works...” turns a blind eye (or at least a jaundiced one) to the scriptures that indicate we are saved by works – most notably Jesus’ sermon in Matthew 23.  Evangelical views on the nature of God, the existence of hell, the atoning work of Jesus, and the free gift of salvation by grace, these all served to motivate an army of volunteers willing to do their part to save the world. But while the Christian hoi polloi may be no more biblically literate (probably less so) than in the past, they increasingly know that the Bible contains bigger, wider, and more complex views.  Understandably they are no longer willing to burn-out (physically, emotionally and spiritually) in an evangelical cause that is less-convincing than ever. 

  2.  Confrontation is tiring and life-draining  The concept that believers in Jesus (and specifically, evangelical-style believers) are “saved”, and the rest  “lost”, established a ‘them’ and ‘us’ delineation that most Christians now find draining.  They work alongside people who are full-of-life and creative.  They have family members and friends, who are loving, and deep thinkers. 

Eventually we just got tired of believing that our meagre attempts at doing life are somehow more acceptable to God, than our neighbours.  We suspect that our selective morality, that allows us to ignore Jesus’ command to give away our possession but damns our friends for having sex before marriage, just doesn’t add up.  Consequently we’re no longer willing to tell people to become like us in order to be saved. 

  3.  The over-emphasis on the after life  Evangelism has largely been about securing an eternal destiny.  After all, this life on earth is just a finger snap compared to eternity, right?  Maybe, but actually life here on earth is pretty damn important to us.  In the midst of all the crap that goes on, we want it to work.  And the notion we were sold as kids that the evangelical milieu would have a better handle on life as well as an eternal paradise, has proved to be bullshit. 

The notion that by belonging to a Bible-believing, evangelical church, we would be part of a great caring community, that was full of life and energizing, has proved to be something of a joke.  So much so, that even if we wanted to see our neighbours “saved”, most of us wouldn’t invite them to our church, fearful that they would get discouraged. 

  4.  We  value authenticity over institution  Over the last 40 years we have had more and more questions about faith, and about the practise of evangelism.  Important questions.  Troubling issues.  But these haven’t been welcomed.  Quite the reverse, they’ve been written off as doubt or rebellion.  No surprise that burying them didn’t make them go away.  They were just internalised and we voted with our feet.  And we’re still voting.                          

 

I can think of a number of additional reasons but these will suffice for now.  

   Most who know me are aware I spent nearly 40 years in Youth for Christ – about as evangelical an organisation as you can get.  I’d still be in it, except the International leadership of YFC removed the New Zealand branch from the organisation after we morphed into a collective of people determined to follow Jesus and our hearts.  That’s ok.  Their prerogative. 

   But here’s what’s fascinating – they subsequently tried to re-start YFC in NZ by contacting numerous people who had previously worked in the organisation.  Without success.  After 60 years of an established, supposedly well-respected and effective evangelistic organisation, no-one suitable could be found with the passion to make it work.  I’m not surprised.