Helping people make connections with God…

captain’s blog

I’ve been corresponding with some people and thinking some more on the subject of revival since my last post. I’m grateful for the enthusiasm with which prayer (including prayer for revival) has been embraced by many here, following the successful launch of the Prayer Room initiative in St Andrews a couple of years ago. Now I’d like us to work towards focussing our ideas a bit more. In reply to some guys who believe good, old-style Revival is coming to St Andrews, I wrote the following. It’s not meant to sound negative; just to focus our attention a bit more strategically…..

…….
If indeed Revival does strike St Andrews, it will be essential to avoid the mistakes of the past. The recent revivals in the UK, including that spearheaded by Billy Graham in the sixties, when church attendance in Scotland DOUBLED in a matter of weeks, have all foundered on the lack of church structures capable of containing the New Wine. Three years after Billy Graham left, the status quo had been restored. Why? Because so many of the new and revitalized believers had not been drawn into accountable (“discipling”) relationships in well-led, Spirit-filled churches.

Revival, like the moment of salvation, is not the end: it’s a beginning, and as such it cannot be our goal. If it’s going to be worth the effort of praying for in the first place, we’ll first have to become a local church/churches full of leaders: self-sacrificing, dedicated, wise, patient, teachable leaders who are ready, willing and able to take the lead when the new people come in. Otherwise we’ll be like a thirsty man in a desert praying for a shower of rain. Actually, the first thing he needs to pray for is a bucket…… or perhaps he just needs to expend some time and energy making one. (That’s kind of what Carol and I are trying to do here.) Once he has a bucket he can sensibly pray for rain, knowing that when the shower comes he’s not merely going to move from a state of dry-and-thirsty to one of wet-and-thirsty.

In short it’s not much use praying for revival if you aren’t also planning for revival and preparing for revival. Consider how the St Andrews churches would cope if their congregations suddenly doubled or tripled, and that with completely unchurched people. How would we cope and how long would those new “converts” stick around?
…….

……I believe that as we work patiently to build up the church(es), through our relationships and every gift of the Spirit, we are approaching nearer to a state of readiness for Revival with a capital ‘R’, whilst witnessing every day the creeping, small ‘r’ revival we already have. “Do ye not perceive it?”, as the old-timers used to say!

Captain’s Blog 05092011

I believe we aren’t waiting for revolution or revelation, or even revival. I think we are already in the midst of all three, and if we have the patience to step each one through in obedience and tenacious fortitude, we’ll begin to see and experience them more and more. I believe it’s a creeping revival, a subversive revolution and a progressive revelation. And I believe patience is the primary call of the Spirit in our age. Not comfortable is it?

Stardate0609.10

A busy time is approaching, with new Freshers to welcome, and seemingly quite a few new families beginning to take an interest too.  We also look forward to Alpha and a new Evening Service, back at the Cosmos Centre, in addition to all the stuff we are doing already; much of which, like Storehouse, is simply growing whether we like it or not….and of course we do.

In periods of change it can be easy to get a bit flustered: to let things get under our skin that wouldn’t normally bother us. Things will look a little different at times, and mistakes will doubtless be made.  We’ll feel the insecurity, the seeming fragility and the strangeness of the New. At the same time, our lives may well get busier in all sorts of other ways, just with the stuff of work and family, especially in the run-up to Christmas.  And along with that comes an opportunity the Enemy never fails to take: to accuse the church of ignoring us, taking and never giving back, and perhaps above all of MAKING us too busy to enjoy life.

If we are to cope with this well, the first thing is to know our enemy, and see what he’s about.  Let’s all decide right now never to blame the church for over-busy-ness that really comes from other sources.  The second is to take adequate time to REST: and I don’t mean indulging in “leisure activities”, I mean proper, Sabbath-style Rest.  I’m not going all Pharisee here, or even Western Isles Presbyterian.  I just mean that high octane computer games, paint-balling, sky-diving, road-racing etc are leisure, but they are not REST.

Sitting with a Bible or a novel in the garden where you can hear the birds singing and the trees rustling in the wind would qualify.  Sitting with a coffee listening to a favourite album would qualify, especially if you have good hi-fi.  Going for a walk would qualify.  A night of pure silliness in the pub with people you are in no way responsible for might qualify.  If your work is mainly in the mind, even a vigorous work-out at the gym might qualify.  Certainly the prayer of thankfulness: best done with a journal, qualifies.  (In fact you might say that’s one of the purposes for godly rest: it gives us time and space to count our blessings, which re-calibrates our life-dials in a most wonderful way.) These are all activities that actively reduce stress.  They allow our adrenalin (etc) levels to return to normal.

Rest is a discipline.  That’s why God insists on it.  We’ve all got a thousand reasons not to rest, and if we allow our stress levels to get unhealthily high, we all have a million reasons why we CAN’T.  And that’s enemy activity too: telling us we don’t deserve to rest.  In fact I’m not sure deserving comes into it at all.  Rest is a medical necessity and a Biblical imperative, so only a fool wastes time wondering if he deserves it.

And the third thing, I think, that helps us keep a level head (“when all around are losing theirs and blaming it on you”{RK}),  which again takes time I’m afraid, is deliberately to reflect on the past.  We’ve been through changes and difficulties before.  We’ve added new activities and ministries before.  Things have gone-wrong-before-they-went-right before.  And as we look back, we can clearly see that most of the changes we’ve gone through have been for the better.  The church has grown in size, in the ministries we are able to support, in our understanding and dedication to the King of Kings, and in the quality and depth of relationships too.

We are all signed up to a vision that is simply encapsulated in the tag-line: “helping people make connections with God”.  We don’t have to do a thousand new things to achieve that goal.  In fact, on the basis that we want to try and proceed at a pace that doesn’t kill the church, best we don’t.  But it is time to welcome more pre-Christians through Alpha, Christians into existing and new Home Groups, and Everyone to more Sunday worship.  As we seek to help people find answers to their deepest questions in Alpha, friendship and support in Home Groups, and an added opportunity of meeting with Jesus on Sundays, I think we’ll tick most of the boxes for what we need to be doing as a church right now.

Let’s grab a coffee some time and talk about it.

Toby

Captain’s Blog: Stardate June 2010

I’m over in Tiree just now, getting away from the Insistent the Urgent and concentrating, albeit briefly, on the Ignored and the Important. I find this (roughly annual) retreat very helpful in taking stock of the year just gone, seeing where we stand in regard to the Last Plan Made, and setting some personal and church targets for the next year.

Last time I was here, I got one thing right: the fact that I had planned to plan. (Top Tip of the week, BTW: if you don’t plan to plan you never get time to do it.) We had worked through our first Five-year Plan for the church, mostly successfully, and had therefore run out of Plan; both in terms of time remaining and goals left to achieve… with the one exception of church-planting. But I also got something wrong, and that was assuming the next plan would be a second five-year plan. What I felt God actually led me to turned out to be something much more exciting but also rather more vague than I tend to be comfortable with. It turned out to be something more like a wish-list/dreamscape for what I call “Phase II” of KV.  I haven’t felt permitted to put a time limit on the building of this phase. But leaving the time-frame open-ended in this way enabled me to open my eyes to many more possibilities than I would have considered in a five-year plan.

When I did my Police driving course, many years ago, the main thing the instructor had to discipline me to do was to “Lift your vision”. If you are going to drive fast safely, you have to look much further ahead than if all you want to do is potter around town at 30 MPH. (Actually, most of us would also do THAT more safely, if we learned to “Lift our Vision”!)

And that reminds me of something Jesus said to His disciples, one time, (Jn 4:35) in the context of doing His Father’s will, in this case having a chat with the Woman at the Well: “Lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white and ready for the harvest”. John goes on to relate, a few verses further down, how many people in that town came to believe in Jesus because of the testimony of that woman whom He’d taken the time to speak to.

Their conversation, which had such a life-changing effect on the whole town, was culturally highly unusual, taking place between a Jewish rabbi, and a Samaritan woman. It was an opportunity you’d need open eyes and an extremely open mind to see, if you were a Jew at that time. It also took place at a time when the disciples were away in town buying provisions. It seems therefore that the harvest Jesus was drawing their attention to was one of people who would be wide open to the Kingdom message, if only someone noticed the opportunity.

But notice too that He says “Lift up your eyes” and see. The problem is that they are in the “eyes-down” position where they can only see what they happen to be concentrating on at the time: in this case getting lunch! I believe we are all guilty, from time to time, of getting so concerned with our own agendas that we miss the “harvest”. This can include everything from the most self-centred projects, such as providing what we feel we need for emotional survival, to things we are definitely doing for God; like church leadership!

Paradoxically, “lifting up our eyes” seems to involve two apparently contradictory elements. In the first place, if we are ever going to get beyond a purely Reactive form of Kingdom living, where all we do is respond at the last minute to whatever comes up on our screen, then we certainly need to find time to plan. But equally, we cannot live with our heads in the clouds, so concentrating on our wonderful plans that we miss the opportunities that are staring us in the face.

The best drivers have a long-term plan in their heads of how they are going to get from where they are to their destination. But they also remain very much alive to what’s ahead in the road. Indeed they see it in the distance, long before you or I would, and are already making short-term plans to get the car safely through the hazards, into the service station, or whatever the desired outcome might be. (In the latter instance, it means that they also have a close eye on the dials and notice every detail of how the car is performing, but that’s another matter.)

I am trying to learn to plan like this: both to make long-term plans for the next phase of the journey, but also to keep a sharp eye on the road ahead and making good “driving plans” to negotiate whatever comes up. In particular, I’m trying to get better at seeing the unexpected opportunities that arise all over the place for the Gospel.

God is for you

From committed atheists to full-blown Jesus-freaks, very few of us really understand the message Jesus came to bring: that the Kingdom of God has come to Earth. From Day One of His mission, He called this “The Good News” of the Kingdom of God.  Tragically all too often the church has presented not the Good News, but only the Bad News.  In extreme cases, the hugely hopeful message of Jesus has been twisted into one of fear: “Turn or Burn!”

So before we can really get into the meat of Jesus’ teaching and the new life He came to bring, we have to understand this: God really is for us.  You may have seen a leaflet with this message on.  We can look at this simple sentence in four different ways.

At the very outset of His mission on Earth, Jesus set out His stall; His “manifesto” if you like, by indicating the types of people this mysterious Kingdom of God had come to reach.  You can find this in the Bible, in the first few verses of Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 5.  There He lists not the good and the godly: not the brilliant, the wealthy or the confident, sorted-out people.  He speaks of the spiritually empty, the sad and sorrowful, the quiet and unassertive, victims of injustice, those who don’t or can’t stand up for themselves. There are no fewer of those in today’s society than there were then. It is important to note that Jesus spoke these words primarily to His first followers: most of whom were actually quite successful in life. Nevertheless He wanted them to concentrate on reaching the outcasts of society.  He Himself was often criticised by the religious people of His day for spending time with prostitutes, thieves and drunks.  Why? Because whether you are a well-to-do businessman or tradesperson like some of His disciples were, or whether you are a drug addict or a single mother with a load of debt, God is for YOU.

As in Jesus’ own time, many today feel so unworthy of God’s love that we can’t approach Him.  Or maybe we think: “He might love some people, but not me”.  Tragically, Christians can sometimes give the impression that God is a legalistic being, looking for reasons to destroy us.  In John’s Gospel, Chapter 3, Jesus brings a very different message about God.  Talking to one of the religious leaders – people who tried to please God through obeying a long list of “Do’s and Don’ts” – He says

“I have come into the world as God’s representative: not to condemn the world but to save it.  It’s because of God’s love that He sent me, not because he is angry with everyone”.

This is actually quite a complex chapter in which He makes some extremely challenging remarks, but at the centre of it all is not God’s anger: far from it.  At its very core is His love and His longing for people to make connections with Him. God is FOR us not against us.

Many of us look around the world and see nothing but suffering.  (Of course, this isn’t actually true, but it is what the news media regard as news-worthy, so it is what we tend to see, which in itself is depressing.)  Everything around us seems to cry out that the world is filled with injustice, sickness, disasters and starvation.  In fact, it is a mess; but it’s one Jesus came to clear up.  It’s popular to say: “if there was a loving God, none of this would happen”.  This is an argument that has been around ever since the First Century, and St John would have been more than familiar with it.  His answer to it is found in his first letter, Chapter 4:

“God is love. The love of God was displayed among us when God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. This is what love is about: not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to take away all our sins.”

Many of us have good reasons for wondering if it’s true, (and I’d be delighted to discuss them with you over a coffee) but the truth is that God IS for you!

St Paul was the leading preacher of the 1st Century, planting new churches all over the Northern Mediterranean.  For his pains he had been shipwrecked, beaten up, imprisoned, flogged, often gone hungry and lived in constant fear for his life.  He was familiar with more opposition than most of us will ever see in our lifetime.  Yet despite all these experiences he understood the love of God.  A thousand voices in his head must have been telling him God wasn’t on his side, but look what he writes in his letter to the Romans, Chapter 8:

“If God is for us, who can be against us?……Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?…….No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Even when everything seems to conspire against us, God Himself is for us: 100% on our side, and longing to get involved in our lives.

Whoever you are, whatever you have done and whatever you believe, God is for you.  If you’d like to know more, please join us one Sunday, or get in touch via the church office.  What have you got to lose?