Athens Polytechnic

Zografou, the suburb in which we live, is hemmed in to the east and south by Athens University (where we took our Greek lessons in the early years of being here) and to the north by Athens Polytechnic. To the west lies the city centre, a 10 minute bike ride downhill.

Athens - city centre, Zografou, University and Polytechnic

It's always been a puzzle to me why we have never, ever had contact with students and events at the Polytechnic. We have a small group at the University, we've done a couple of evangelistic outreaches there, we run Coffee & Cookies there periodically. But at the Poly - nothing. 

Ever.

Until yesterday.

Panorama of the Engineering Faculty at Athens Polytechnic

At our October conference I met a 2nd year engineering student and we've kept in touch, trying to find time to meet, encouraging him to come along to stuff. Yesterday after all these months of trying we met for a 1-2-1, starting in our new series in John's gospel. Good little Bible study, relaxed connection. 

I've also been trying for a couple of weeks to make contact with a Christian professor, and he messaged before my 1-2-1 saying we could meet at 5. So, from 4-5 I sat in a classroom with the student and then he waited with me to meet the professor - who it turns out teaches him! He didn't know he was a Christian, but told me that he'd noticed there was something different about this professor - happier, kinder, better.

It was a useful conversation (to do with a big project for the autumn - you'll hear about it soon) but it explained a little why perhaps we've never previously had contacts at the Poly. He said that the atmosphere and the mood there is deeply hostile to anything not leftwing politically, and anything religious is excluded and opposed. He also said that the levels of corruption are alarming. The same people who are dishonestly connected to industry for personal gain are the ones who are shouting about speaking against corruption in government and the banks.

It is a godless, perverse place it would seem - as is the whole world, but here perhaps more acutely than in other institutions.

At any rate, it's another institution where we're trying to plant gospel seeds. Three big questions on my mind:
1. What are realistic expectations that we can have for gospel progress when I'm in contact with one student with appetite and one with very little?
2. How do we help our small numbers of believing students to have any confidence that God can save people with no gospel background?
3. With the autumn evangelistic opportunities in mind, is it right to think about trying to do something big and public in such a hostile place?

Pray for Athens Polytechnic!

Στην υγειά μας! (To our health)

For most of the last few months I've forgotten we even have a blog. I read some blogs regularly and find them useful, and have never ever thought that ours could ever be 'useful' in that sense, but as I went to bed last night I thought I'd pop this brief thought down. Our family have all been poorly (sick, for non-Brits) for much of the last three weeks, on and off. There's a virus going round - lots of people have had it - and all of us have missed days of school and work. Dawn went to Berlin feeling ropey and came back worse. Joel and Hannah are currently in bed while I've just taken the two healthiest, Esther and (miraculously) Ruth to school. I'm mostly now better.

Anyway, being laid low (in a very minor way) is a frustration. When we're ill (Dawn and I) it makes taking care of the family harder. We feel our isolation more keenly (no relatives, friends live mostly far away across the city). We don't cook as well, shopping is more subsistence level, we miss work, miss church etc etc. When the kids are ill it throws them out of routine. But it's all minor.

And I was just reminded that (a) we can never take our health for granted - it's a gift of God, and a temporary one at that (b) we know people who have genuinely awful health situations at the moment (c) I'm rather proud and self-sufficient when it comes to keeping going physically.

One obvious application from a few weeks of niggling illness is some more humility and dependence on God. Another is more empathy with people who are actually suffering. Another is daily gratitude for the good things we have when we have them. And finally, persistent prayer to ask for the things we need.

Anyone who wants to live a godly life...

I have no idea what Mr Eich (http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536) thinks about Jesus, but it's a vivid illustration of what John Stevens writes so clearly about in this post: http://www.john-stevens.com/2014/03/the-implications-of-gay-marriage.html

"Mozilla's new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid."

It is a free country, and people are free to use that freedom to target people with whom they disagree. That means that we must expect to be opposed if we hold to godly convictions, but it also gives us food for thought as to how we treat those with whom we disagree.

Like I said, who knows what Mr Eich thinks about Jesus but if I was the CEO of a high-profile company, I should expect to receive similar flak if my views were known.

What I saw from the car, written on a plane then a train

This is about home, desire and heaven.

I’m starting this on the plane somewhere over the Peloponnese about to descend in to Athens (now home) after a short trip to England for a wedding in Beeston (was home) this past weekend. Between us Dawn and I have made such brief visits back to the motherland a number of times in the last seven years. Let’s see if I can remember all these solo visits (i.e. not the whole family) as a brief exercise to try and hold my mental deterioration at bay a little longer: my grandpa’s funeral, Dawn’s dad’s heart surgery, Tim and Nicky’s wedding (Dawn), UCCF staff conference (me), Beeston Free Mission Sunday (me) and Michael and Rachel’s commissioning service (Dawn). It’s one of the ways in which we are aware of the blessing of being in Athens - to be able to return easily and cheaply for a long weekend would simply not be possible for plenty of overseas-based friends, so we’re grateful to be able to.

This trip was, as almost always, a real pleasure and privilege. 

(As I listen to Doves' 'Kingdom of Rust - "My God, it takes an ocean of trust in the kingdom of rust" - I can feel the descent beginning - ear-drum pressure is increasing - which means the rest of this will be written at home in Athens.)

[Inevitably a good few days passed after landing, but I decided to just publish the blog as it came out without too much editing, so here’s the rest of my piece, now being written on the night train to Athens on my way back from Skopje.]

Simply because I love maps, and it breaks up the text, here’s my journey:

As you see, I didn’t go anywhere spectacular. Gatwick to Horsham at night, Horsham to Oxford on the M25/M40 (yawn - except that there was for once in many years no hold up whatsoever), Oxford to Beeston via Milton Keynes and the M1, Beeston to Bristol via the M42/M5, and Bristol to Gatwick via Tesco Express and the M4. Very prosaic. All these journeys were happily made on days of glorious sunshine and crystal clear horizons, giving me the pleasure of seeing England at her end-of-winter/almost-spring beautiful best. It really was stunning. This is a significant detail, as you’ll see if you read on.

Now Greece is a beautiful country - extremely so - as long as you get out of Athens, and most of Attica. But England is not too shabby either, even in the understated south. I saw ancient Oxford, and the view over Christchurch College from the top floor of the IFES/UCCF office. I had lunch by a log fire in an old Cotswold pub. I saw the agricultural Midlands with its perfect fields and hedges and copses, the lovely Malvern Hills, that great village by the Avon somewhere around Tewkesbury, the long stretch of non-urban M4 corridor. And 99% of this was accompanied by perfectly courteous British driving (the rude Audi by Newport Pagnell being just about the only exception) and a mixture of banal Radio 1 (they have no shame), patchy Radio 2 (new high score of 24 on Popmaster) and fascinating Radio 4 (first car ever without medium wave so no Five Live. Weird.)

Anyway. 

So I was thinking, somewhere along the M40 I think, that here were stretches of countryside and townscape that, as far as the Clarks are concerned, are far more desirable to live in than Athens. We fairly quickly grew fond of Athens. It’s a privilege to live in such a place, despite its chaos and its real difficulties. And in most significant ways we’re genuinely happy to be living there. We have no plans to leave. When we return to Greece after our summer visits to England, we are truly happy to be returning ‘home’. 

But really, if we were to make a plain choice about where we would ‘like’ to live, Athens wouldn’t be top of the list. 

But this is the point. If one was to make a list, what would be top? Even yesterday I was asked where would I most like to live of all the places I’ve ever lived? And I knew immediately where that would be. My semi-longing gazes across the lovely English countryside (I’ve had this idea over the past few years, probably provoked by our removal from it, that the English have a much stronger and more affectionate connection to our green and pleasant land than our cold, detached, joyless exterior might suggest! I do not include our ruined cityscapes in this affection) of course made me think about the many ways in which it would be great live in one of those places. 

The possibility of walks in the woods and fields (largely litter-free), of country pubs with real ale, a connection with our ancestral heritage and history, of living in a town with cycle paths, the possibility of the kids going to a local primary school with school sports teams and a more colourful and varied curriculum and range of clubs and activities, of a local library to make use of, of unlimited access to mature cheddar and Lincolnshire sausages to make our Saturday morning fry-ups that little bit more complete, of straightforward online bill payment and so on (not even one visit to a government ministry to register a new car, let alone the four it took to get our Alhambra properly into our name)…

I’ll stop there. You get the point.

I wasn’t feeling particularly downcast about any of these musings, though perhaps a little melancholy, nor was I feeling a particularly strong lust or desire for those (pretty superficial) things but in his kindness the Holy Spirit brought back to the front of my mind a verse that Dawn and I have treasured many times over the past years:

Abraham was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. (Hebrews 11)

Two things were suddenly really clear. First, the desire I felt for the good things in life was not a bad one. I think in the past I have often thought that the right response to wondering how wonderful it might be to live somewhere ‘better’ is to suppress those desires because they’re superficial, distracting or idolatrous. But the truth is that though they could be all those things, they’re actually a pale reflection of the greater desire we should have, like Abraham did, for the city with foundations. They show that we’re built to have longings. 

A nicer house in a nice part of the world? Access to Sainsbury’s? Green fields? UK libraries and schools? Less administrative hassle? All good things and much to be appreciated. But come on, Jonathan, they’re not exactly brilliant ambitions. You can do better than that.

The second thing was that remembering the verse brought liberation to not worry about the apparent hassle of living in Athens. Wherever I live in the world, without godly contentment I will always long to be somewhere better. Last summer we drove along this road in Cuffley, Hertfordshire. 

It was intimidatingly wealthy. We were chuckling about how one would feel if, after working hard enough to be able to afford to buy a really nice house on The Ridgeway, Cuffley, your heart started lusting after the one next door which also has a pool. Or the other one with a tennis court. Or the one with half a mile of land stretching down to the river. And so on. How much is enough? Just a little bit more, JP Getty is said to have mused. So true, without contentment, and without the longer picture. 

I might wish I was back in Thorndyke Close, But I could be there, and then wish that a thousand small things could be better, without contentment and the longer picture. I could wish I was back in Zimbabwe with a cold beer by the table football table and the long, slow African hours to enjoy doing nothing. I could wish I had a different job with more satisfaction or better pay. I could wish my nicer house was a bit closer to the Lake District for easier access to Buttermere on that perfect summer’s day or Wastwater when the snows come. I could wish that we lived closer to those particular dear friends who we’d love to be able to visit more easily. There’s no way of being peacefully content and satisfied anywhere, doing anything, without godly contentment and the longer picture.

The hassles are real. The downsides to living anywhere are real (though almost always relative, let’s not forget). So it’s not a case of just having positive thoughts or being stoical when faced with the downsides of wherever we are or whatever we’re doing, and banishing the desires to be somewhere else or someone else. The reality, the deliberately ordained reality, is that life under the sun (or cloud depending on one’s geographical particularity!) is in that one sense meaningless, and to be lived as it was meant to be lived: that is, with our hearts set not on the next best thing we can imagine, which in the end is not as good as the next best thing after that, but on the ultimate good. That’s what Hebrews 11 means. It’s what Paul meant: 

‘…as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal’  (2 Cor 4)

The absence of the good things that I was imagining on my pleasant drive around southern England I can confidently and happily say fall very squarely into what Paul described as ‘slight momentary affliction’. So slight, so momentary, when compared to the far worse afflictions he himself had been suffering, and so many people are suffering elsewhere in the world. But laughably slight and momentary when compared to the eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. 

Again, it’s not that the hassles are not real. They are. It’s not that the desire to enjoy a better life is not real. It is. But it must be relativised, and put into its proper place, which is as a pointer to something better, something ultimately good, something and somewhere and someone who surpasses all the possible desires we’ve ever had, with the result that we’ll never have another longing, never another regret, never another pang of homesickness, never another ‘I wish that…’ - because we’ll be in the city with foundations whose designer and builder is God. An eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison. Beauty and perfection beyond anything the Cotswolds or the Lake District could offer.

It means we (not just the Clarks) can live fully committed to where we are and what we’re doing without wishing we were somewhere better doing something better as if that was an end in itself, or  some kind of ultimately satisfying thing, because it can’t be. The desire for something nicer, or the wish that we didn’t have the hassles and disappointments we do, should make us remember in a very real, practical, life-altering way, that there’s a greater joy to be desired and a more complete promise of no hassle, than we could possibly attain with our pathetically weak desires for things we can see now. So for the moment, no matter how lovely England might look, or how pleasant a life she might offer, or how many small ambitions I might harbour, there's something more lovely, more pleasant and more worthwhile. It's something we all ought to deliberately wait for all of the time.

Coincidentally, in between starting and ending this piece, I came across this quote, allegedly from St. Patrick:

"Daily I expect to be murdered or betrayed or reduced to slavery if the occasion arises, but I fear nothing, because of the promises of heaven."

People say all sorts of things about heaven these days, but usually they have the effect of downgrading heaven in favour of what goes on here and now. But that's not right, is it. The promises of heaven are so good, and they put our slight momentary afflictions in perspective, and free us to do good in this world, and free us to not desire the very good things of this world more than what the promises of heaven offer. 

Not just idle words

IFES Athens small groups have been studying passages from Mark since late October. I've loved being involved. No matter how many times I take part in a Mark series (and there have been plenty since Beeston Free and UCCF's Identity a decade ago) I've not even gotten close to being bored, not even gotten close to being able to say 'got that one ticked off'. Such a privilege to be given time and opportunity to mine the inexhaustible depths of the the very words of God.

There's another 65 books to mine, however, and we're about to start a series in Malachi with the students in Athens. It won't be the first time here either - thanks to Nottingham CU in 2001 and the students here in 2008. Just begun preparation this morning and it's like seeing an old friend for the first time in a while, and remembering just how good that friendship is for your heart. Just the first five verses are packed with rebuke, encouragement, hard truth, humbling truth, light and life.

It's not rocket science is it.

They are not just idle words for you – they are your life. (Moses, circa 1400BC)

The Gospels

Our blog doesn't really have a theme. We don't write frequently enough for one to emerge. It's a bit random, but that's OK I think. We just pop stuff down occasionally, as and when 'stuff' crops up, and we have time and memory to post. 

Some 'stuff' has been cropping up for a while now relating to the gospels - the four of them at the start of the New Testament. I think this has been brewing since about 1993! 

Here's the background.

[And a disclaimer: none of this is likely to be particularly new or noteworthy for anyone reading this: it's all rather Noddy-ish, but I don't think that means it's not useful - even if only for me, a bear of little brain, to properly take note and make real progress. Enough flannel.]

Being a member of a good UCCF [IFES Great Britain for the uninitiated] Christian Union from 93-96 I was enormously privileged to take part in the very first 'gospel project', the fruit of Nigel Lee's walk with the Lord. This was called 'The Big Idea' (can't find it on google anywhere!) and was based on giving thousands of copies of a specially-produced Luke's gospel to students across the UK. (Anyone reading this remember that?) We saw a number of people become Christians at Birmingham.

A big part of the project was studying the whole book in our CU small groups so we were learning from God's word ourselves, and being prepared and equipped to engage meaningfully with others as we offered it.

Dave Burke, now (I think) a pastor in North East England was the main speaker at a mission week and I remember him saying to us at one point, perhaps in the preparatory house party, that a serious Christian will build in to his regular Bible reading a continual revisiting of the four gospel books. I sort of took it on board.

Three years later we repeated the project nationally, this time using John's gospel, calling it Breakthrough. Again, good stuff. We spent loads of time in Birmingham studying John and preparing simple evangelistic Bible studies. (One girl converted through that project  - unknown to me at the time - ended up sitting in our kitchen in Athens about five years ago. I wrote about it here.)

A few years later we were heavily involved in the Identity project, based on Mark, whilst on UCCF staff in the East Midlands, and I began to get to know Mark well (really for the first time in my life, I'm ashamed to say). Since then - 2001 - I've had cause to go back to Mark again and again - on Paros every year, for example, and not got bored yet! Even yesterday, sitting with Giannis in Starbucks to help him prepare for his small group Bible study tonight in west Athens, we were in Mark 4 and I saw something that I'd never noticed before, despite hearing the definitive teaching series on the whole book at Beeston Free [seeds are very growy things…] and despite having studied Mark 4 dozens of times in the past 12 years.

This is turning out longer and windier than I'd expected. Sorry.

Anyway, thanks to UCCF and Beeston Free I'd had good training in three of the four gospels (although Luke is a bit hazy) but really had never seriously gotten into Matthew. Everyone knows some bits of the book, of course, and some bits are rather over-quoted, if that's possible, but hardly any of us know the book as a whole. In some ways that's neither here nor there but we've noticed all sorts of significant issues in ministry and church life and discipleship that often stem from a mishandling of the gospel books.

Here's an example - and the spur to write this post this morning - from Matthew, which I've at long last got round to studying properly. I've just been reading Matthew 2 and something made me glance over to chapter 10. You know how people often take the 'what would Jesus do?' kind of approach to life and ministry? I've long thought it was a faulty question, starting at Birmingham when some CU members were agitating for the CU to take on a broader approach to our mission on campus 'because Jesus wasn't only about evangelism'. Well, true, but our CU commitment to evangelism on campus wasn't a result of saying 'Jesus did evangelism so we will too'. The gospel books don't work like that. When people talk about Jesus doing all sorts of things and we ought to do them too, it's often out of a motivation to make more of Jesus, and with a concern that a more conservative reading seems to seek to limit the ministry of Jesus and limit the ministry of the church. The sad irony however is that it actually ends up making less of Jesus and more of us, because it easily results in missing the point that the gospel books are trying to make about Jesus - who he is and what he came to do - that has much less to do with what we're to do and much more to do with what we're to make of him.

Anyway, the example from Matthew 10 made me chuckle because if one takes the approach of 'do what Jesus did' we'd have to end up disobeying the Great Commission - the over-quoted bit of the book. In Matthew 10:5 Jesus explicitly tells the disciples to NOT go to the Gentiles. So are we supposed to take the gospel to all nations or not? Jesus says not to! How are we supposed to read that kind of book when at one point we read that we're not supposed to go to the Gentiles and later on we are? Which command do we disobey? (These are rhetorical questions by the way!)

The long and short of this meander is that we've got to learn to read those books properly. If we don't we go wrong in all sorts of directions. It's not rocket science.

This book is really helping with this whole issue. It's worth a read if anyone's interested in getting into the gospels better, though the main job is for us just to learn to read the gospels as books, rather than as a series of disconnected passages that we don't quite know how to use. Perhaps one of the questions, rather than 'what would Jesus do?', is 'what are we supposed to make of Jesus given that he did that?'

Forgive the blather, if you've got this far. Dave Burke was probably right to say that we should be regularly in the gospels, especially if by doing so we learn to read them well, appreciate Jesus more deeply, trust and love him more fully, and set about helping to encourage fellow-believers to stop missing his point so regularly.

New student year, new students, new opportunities

We've just returned from a really encouraging start to the new year - around 40 students came along to the opening meeting of the year. Between us we laid out the vision for the year and some of the opportunities that there'll be to be trained, encouraged and equipped to make Christ known in word and deed on the deeply lost campuses of Athens and beyond.

The chap in the green t-shirt addressing the 40 or so students is Dimitris, the brand new director of IFES Greece. He's half-time. Just visible behind his back is Christos who's working with us for 10-15 hours a week. Not present is Manos (working 10-15 hours a week) who was supposed to be running part of the evening but had a motorbike accident on his way to it. I've just heard he escaped with one cut needing stitches. Every time we gather students together in Athens something bad or obstructive happens, but we're relieved he's OK.

It was a really good start to the year, with clarity on vision and purpose, lots of good things for people to get involved with (1-2-1 support, small group Bible studies explicitly shaped to get people living and speaking for Jesus on campus, an advance notice for Paros 2014 plus a regular series of new leaders' training and regular cold-contact outreach - and a good vibe to boot. 

We're really pleased with the start, but now comes the hard part: encouraging them to really get involved and nail their colours to the gospel mast, and helping them to learn (often from scratch) how to really meaningfully engage their fellow students with the good news. This is not going to be helped by the fact that many universities are still closed because they're unable to operate in the current financial climate.

Watch this and other spaces for updates.