The Bible for Bored Christians

‘Can I have a volunteer to read one verse please? It’s a well known verse, you’ll probably recognise it: turn to Jeremiah 29:11.’

Alexandra volunteers, finds the verse and smiles - ‘you’re right: it’s underlined in my Bible!’ She reads the verse out and there are smiles and nods - it is well known. (You might know it without looking it up, but you might as well look it up to be sure).

It’s the fifth training session at The Wave 2020, our IFES Greece summer beach camp. By now the team are used to the format: we introduce today’s topic (‘Will life with God go well for me?’), get them discussing, dig into a Bible passage (just the one passage: no hopping around between verses with the exception of any crucial OT/NT fulfilment passages), and then aim to dig out the God-intended meaning of the passage by allowing the text to interpret itself.

Here's what it looks like (this was discussion on the feeding of the 5000):

By the end of our 45 minute session, I observe the kind of reaction I’ve come to expect with the approach to Bible training that I now normally take. People (not all, of course, but most) are listening and concentrating, thinking of questions, making connections, and often either frowning with thought or smiling with the realisation that God actually speaks in his word (I mean, the Bible is not just lots of words about God but words from God, living and active) and that his word is a word of grace in Christ not law and burden.

I'll rewind briefly.

We’re IFES. Of course we believe in Bible study.

I doubt many people need persuading of that. But to what end? And how? Because we all know that it is possible to get the Bible open with students and see little gospel growth. We were finding that we were opening the Bible with bored Christians - 'We've heard it all before (or least might think we have).' It’s become a bit of a dry routine. And so it has become boring. Why? Well, I've been wondering about this and maybe there are two common tracks we head down that lead to boring Bible teaching.

One is the track that looks to give something practical. We are concerned about not being applied enough, so we look for something that we can tell people 'to do'. I've heard this stated explicitly many times. And so when we get into a passage we are quickly looking for practical lessons for life - the result of which is often burdensome to the people we're to whom we're speaking. Do this, or stop doing that, or do this better, or learn this, or take on this principle, and so on.

Is it right to apply our Bible teaching? Of course. But if our starting point is 'what practical application can I take from this passage?' we may well end up at the wrong destination. And the goal of giving people clear instruction on what to do can easily end up being burdensome, and that ends up being joyless, graceless - and boring.

The other common track is to aim merely for rigorous orthodoxy: to be satisfied with laying out truth and leaving it at that, with no application to real daily life. This comes from a laudable desire to keep us in the truth, which of course needs doing. But if all we do is restate what is already agreed with and not show how that leads to transformation of life and thought and heart, it can end up being joyless, directionless - and boring.

Let me say clearly: what we did at The Wave was not about being more interesting, more exciting. I think I am one of the less interesting public speakers I know (ask my family). But there is something simple and refreshing that we can do to help bored Christians get into the Bible, and I’ve been trying to take this approach more and more over the past couple of years with students (and others) in Greece.

In a nutshell, we want to hold up two approaches to the text side by side and let the Bible itself show which one is better. Do you want to make the text about me, or about Jesus? We’d noticed that although people were very familiar with the Bible, and didn’t need persuading that it is God’s word or important, more often than not the message that people were hearing from Scripture was one of what we must do, and not so much what God has done for us in Jesus. Jesus himself tells us that we should read the Bible as about him (John 5:39-40, for example). So it’s not that surprising that making the Bible about ourselves makes it less captivating, and it’s not surprising that boredom is the result.

What we do is take often-familiar passages and get people to try and dig out a message. Invariably (I’m not exaggerating) we can second-guess the kinds of messages that people pull out. For example, in 1 Kings 19 where Elijah goes to Horeb, the message is often that you have to learn to listen carefully to God’s voice because it can be hard to hear (you know, the still small voice, or the sound of silence). With David and Goliath, it’s about being courageous, and how we can overcome obstacles if we have faith like David. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the application is usually how we ought to be like Jesus, not like the disciples, and learn to stay alert and pray and so on.

Our students are in the habit of looking in Scripture to find out what we must do. If we miss Christ in the text, we miss the main thing. So we are trying to help students to learn to hear God’s word about Jesus in his word and work out how that word about Jesus impacts the way we live and think.

So, back to Jeremiah 29: how will life with God go for me?

Well it's obvious...isn't it? The promise is that God has good plans for my life, so my life will go well...right? That’s why we have the verse underlined, because it sounds so good! But of course the promise in verse 11 (I know the plans etc) comes right after verse 10! And so with just a little bit of proper reading, and resisting the temptation to put myself in the centre of the passage, we see that this is God not actually speaking to me, but to the exiles who want to believe a false prophecy: that their exile will be over in two years. Not so says God: it’s 70 years! So, dig in for the long haul and wait for the promise of being restored to be fulfilled in the end (by which time, if we’re honest, most of the hearers will have died...).

It’s a picture of God keeping his promises for the long haul, isn’t it? Of being brought to the place where God dwells, and dwelling with him, because Jesus brings us out of exile truly and forever. It’s not about being comforted by the promise of employment again when we’ve been made redundant, or a new relationship around the corner if we’ve been through a painful break up, or healing when we’re sick. (Those might all happen of course, it’s just that this promise isn’t about any of those sorts of things.) It’s about something much better and lasting and truly wonderful. A Christ-centred application of this passage takes us to hope in the long-term future fulfilment of a promise - hope in the new heaven and the new earth brought about by the life and work of Jesus. An attempt to apply without Jesus driving that application leads to expectations of a life here and now that just isn't promised to us, and fixes our eyes on nearer and narrower horizons, rather than broader and more glorious ones that truly motivate and encourage us to keep going.

Our horizons contract and our hopes shrink when we make the Bible about me, or when we make Bible study more of an intellectual/theological exercise. Our Christianity becomes boring, because it’s not about something really great. But when we make it about Jesus (what am I talking about? When we see that it is about Jesus!) our horizons expand, our hopes are brighter, our life takes its rightful place in Jesus with him in the spotlight.

This is just the start of a long process of disciple-making. It’s relatively straightforward to help people have this eye-opening moment of seeing that the Bible is about Jesus and not about me. That application that starts with having Jesus at the centre leads to growth in the grace offered by the gospel. It needs to be done consistently and regularly and comprehensively, but it’s a good start.

Get some bored Christians reading the Bible with Jesus at the centre!

[If you're interested in looking into any of the passages that we've covered in Floga, I'll post a link here soon to a separate site with a summary of each one]

Back at Relay 1 - 22 years later...

This summer we had the privilege of being invited to speak at the World Mission Night of UCCF's Relay 1 conference.

In September 1996, Jonathan and I went to Relay 1, the orientation training conference for Relay Workers on UCCF's graduate training programme. We had both been involved in our university Christian Unions our whole student lives and had been significantly blessed and developed as we'd served on the Executive Committees of our CUs; attending UCCF's regional and national training conferences and beginning to grasp what gospel ministry involved. We both applied to Relay and were accepted onto the programme to continue to live and work in our university cities (Birmingham and York). We'd never met. We happened to sit by each other in the first morning session on the first full day of the conference. Little did we know what a massive impact Relay would have on our lives. 

Relay is how we met, but it's so much more than that. Relay has shaped so much of our life and ministry together: the agenda, the principles and our outlook. The focus of much of the teaching of Relay, as it equips young gospel workers starting out in ministry, is grace and the call, in a 2 Timothy 2:2-style, to pass on what we are learning. With the gospel of grace as our foundation and motivation, we were encouraged to LEARN and to find those "faithful others" to pass that on to. It continues to encourage us to see how Relay has impacted not just UCCF, but IFES worldwide and the church in the UK and abroad.

And so, 22 years on, we found ourselves back in the Severn Lodge Meeting Room speaking to this years' Relay Workers, with our four children listening. Jonathan spoke from the "classic text for world mission" (his words), Ezra 1, and a bit from Ephesians 3.

Severn Lodge Meeting Room

The Ezra passage points to God's priority (which has always been his priority, from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22) to establish his dwelling with people, and to have a people who are his own, and who enjoy his presence forever. The mission that God has left in the stewardship of his people is to be part of the building of his temple - which Ezra 1 points to, which Jesus fulfils in his own body, and which Ephesians 3 shows is the task to be continued until the end. We had an opportunity to encourage the 75 staff and Relay workers to consider how they might contribute to this in whatever small way, and to remind them that though the needs are great and unending in the UK, they are perhaps greater and less begun in many other parts of the world, and certainly in almost all of continental Europe.

I gave my testimony really on the impact that Relay had on my worldview and my attitude to world mission. It went something like this:

I don't come from a mish-kid background and I grew up thinking missionaries were sad, losers who didn't like British culture and that's why they went somewhere else. I'd see them in their ill-fitting Laura Ashley or home-made dresses and think, "No, that is not for me. I love England. Why would I live somewhere else?" And, even here, at Relay 1's World Mission Night, I remember praying for two ex-Relay Workers who were working with IFES in Siberia and thinking, "They're CRAZY! Who would go to SIBERIA?! I'll pray for them, but I'm not impressed. Rather them than me."

Relay 1996-97 at Relay 1 on the lawn at Quinta, September 1996

So, it all came as a bit of a shock when, at Relay 2, the January conference, in a church hall in Edinburgh, God challenged me to sort out my priorities. Rose Dowsett was speaking on World Mission and she made a couple irrefutable statements about God:

1. God is your loving Heavenly Father and he knows what's best for you
2. God is the God of the WHOLE WORLD

Then she made one annoyingly logical argument:

• If that's true, who are you to say, "I will serve you, God, this far and no further"?

That was annoying, because I couldn't argue with that. Then she gave one challenge:

• If you can't argue with that, can I challenge you to pray that you'll be willing to go wherever God wants to send you.

Well, I love a challenge. But not one like that! So, despite my best efforts, I found myself in a position where, against my will, I prayed something like this, "Lord, you know I'm not happy about this, but you are God and I am not, and you do know what's best for me. So, if you really want to, I'm up for going wherever and doing whatever you think is best." I felt like Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing when she says, "Against my will. I am send to bid you to come in for dinner." (Act 2 Scene 3!)

When Jonathan and I first talked about dating, he was clear that he didn't want to go out with someone who wouldn't consider going overseas. God, in his grace, had prepared me for this. I had already, independently and months before, prayed that prayer. I could tell Jonathan, with impunity, that I was willing to go wherever. And I'm so glad God had done that. I'm sure that, if I hadn't prayed that prayer in January, in late March I would have been so eager to go out with Jonathan, I'd have agreed to anything. Then, in all the hardships and struggles of the past 12 years in Greece, I might have blamed Jonathan for bringing us here, or myself for agreeing to be with him. Instead I have been able to see it as part of God's will and for my sanctification.

At Relay 3, the June conference, *spoiler alert* there will probably be a talk (or at least there was in my day...) that will challenge to think about where they might be in 10 years' time. A challenge to set a straight path in discipleship and faith with gospel priorities whatever the circumstances. Exactly 10 years after I prayed that prayer, we had been living in Athens for just over a week.  

It hasn't been easy. There have been many tears and frustrations and disappointments along the way. But, 12 years' into living in Greece, I know it's worth it, even if I don't always feel that way. God has not used me according to my strengths and gifts a lot of the time and he has wrecked my pride in terrible, wonderful and ongoing ways. Language learning is hideous. Fascinating but hideous. Sounding like an idiot and feeling like an outsider are not nice. But we're called to be aliens and strangers and I am longing for a better country - a heavenly one, in a Hebrews 11-style. 

So, I challenge you to think: Is God the God of the whole world? Is he your loving Heavenly Father who knows what's best for you? Then don't limit where or how you will serve him. Let him be God. Be open to being made into the person he wants you to be.

We didn't sugar coat, neither did we put undue pressure on anyone. Our aim was to set forth the truth plainly and provide stimulus for a challenge. There were plenty of good conversations going on over the next hour or so and a number of Relay Workers have expressed an interest in Relay Homestart, the programme that prepares and supports Relay Workers to serve with an IFES movement somewhere else in the world for at least a year after Relay. When I was Relay Administrator, my boss, Andy Shudall, started that programme, and two of our colleagues here in Greece, Tim and Nicky, first came to Greece as Homestarters.

Relay 1 "Bedtime Story" September 2001

We were very aware of the poignancy of our role at Relay 1. Conscious of how God was using us to make his mission to take the good news of the gospel of grace resonate in the hearts of those Relay Workers. We knew what it might be like for them; we'd sat in their seats; we weren't asking them to do anything we hadn't already done. It was a real privilege and responsibility to be involved. 

Ten years ago (there's a theme here...) we visited Forum and I wrote a blog about it (which you can read here). After his talk on John 20:21, John Piper challenged two groups to stand. The first group, those that felt called to commit vocational (whole-life) cross-cultural mission, somewhere between 150 and 200 stood. The second group those that felt called to do some short-term cross-cultural mission - a week, a month, a year or two - a further 400 stood. I was overwhelmed by the enormity of seeing students respond to the call to go to all nations. I wanted to warn them of how painful it was going to be and advise them to think more carefully. 

I didn't feel any of that helplessness this time. I understand the cost; I understand the call; I know the value of responding in faith. We both teared up in our talks. We want to see people take action, to know the cost and count it worth it.

Please pray for these Relay Workers, and the staff, that they would respond to the challenge, whatever that looks like. And pray especially for the 20 or so who are considering Homestart as an option. Ben, the current Relay Coordinator, would like to see at least 10 Relay Workers join Homestart.

We were so encouraged and blessed by our brief time at Relay 1. It was GREAT to be able to join in on a end-of-day Relay staff team meeting and hear staff feeding back on how the Relay Workers are doing. It was like the old days when Jonathan and I were on Relay staff. The kids loved it too and some are considering if they might want to be Relay Workers some day...

I want to dedicate this post to a few key influences during our time on Relay especially: Nigel Pollock, Tim Rudge, Andy Shudall, Richard Cunningham, Neil Powell, Rose Dowsett.

A slightly awkward house situation

We've not said much about this to everyone before now but I've decided to write briefly about our house situation. We've been here almost five years and it really is an ideal home for us. A bit cluttered and chaotic at times, but just a great space and we don't want to leave.

However, in November we learned that the bank is in the process of repossessing it from our landlords, which means we're in tenancy no-man's land until there are new owners of the property. If we had €200000 knocking around we might consider buying it! 

The long and short of it is that in the coming weeks or months we may have to move out. While this would be a pain in the neck, as well as most other parts of our bodies and wallets, it isn't the end of the world - but we'd love to not have to move, for so many reasons.

One result of this process is that I've had to stop paying our rent to the former landlord and pay it into a government fund for this kind of situation, which has been a bureaucratic challenge and has result in me getting the assistance of a lawyer who has recently joined our church, for which we incredibly grateful. 

My first three attempts at doing this properly were amusingly unsuccessful because no one in this particular facility seemed able to actually tell me accurately what needed to be done. I had to hold my tongue when the director said to my lawyer (in my hearing, but in Greek) 'I told him what he had to do but because he's a foreigner he didn't do it properly'. She had told me nothing of the sort! The result was that instead of her taking 2 minutes to tell me what needed to be done properly in January, she ended up taking an hour with a colleague trying to work out what needed to be done to correct the kinks in the process that resulted from my first attempts! Oh well, it all seems to be sorted now... apart from the uncertainty about the apartment.

We'll update it.

Some broad conclusions

I've finished reading the book, and I said I'd write some broad conclusions in this post. 

I want to start with one, taken from the epilogue on page 535:

'It was the rise Jesus...who opened the eyes of the disciples to understand the Scriptures, by reading them in the double light of his own identity as the Messiah and of their ongoing mission to all nations in the power of the Spirit. "This is what is written,... and you will be my witnesses...to the ends of the earth," he said, in that richly missional account which spans the ending of Luke's Gospel and the beginning of Acts.'

'...Christ crucified and risen is the key to all history, for he is the one who accomplished the mission of God for all creation.'

'If, then, it is in Christ crucified and risen that we find the focal point of the whole Bible's grand narrative, and therein also the focal point of the whole mission of God...'

I totally agree. 

And again I raise the question: the way that the many, many different things that are touched on in this book fit together under the heading 'The Mission of God' surely - surely - can't be flattened out in the way that Chris Wright's commitment to holistic mission seems to do so. That is not to say there is only one thing to do - evangelism. I agree with his critique of certain streams of Protestant mission thinking that reduces everything to merely winning souls for heaven. That is truncated and reductionistic.

But what if there is a clearer, simpler, more fundamental answer to the question 'what is God's mission?' that makes the answer to the second question: 'and how do I participate in it?' more accessible and more faithful?

I am convinced there is a better answer. I doubt if Chris Wright would really disagree with it, but I don't think this book has uncovered it.

The last chapter - and the big questions

I'm thinking of writing two more posts after this one:

This one - briefly, some big questions
The next one - some broad conclusions
The final one - my main point.

How's that for succinct?

Today then: if the New Testament deals with God's mission (seemingly exclusively) in terms of the gospel of the messiah being proclaimed to the ends of the earth, of God's salvation being offered to all, then surely that is God's mission? And if so, why has so much of this book seemingly been about how God's mission is so much more than this?

Is it just semantics? Is it unnecessary for me to be seeing distinctions between God's overall mission, his big plan for the world, and the execution of that plan in time, such as the apostles and the early church? In other words, is it possible that the New Testament's clear focus and emphasis on a verbal proclamation of good news about the crucified and risen Jesus just happens to be a New Testament thing, and really only one element or one dimension of a much broader mission?

I think that's unlikely... 

Furthermore, questions remain, not really as a result of what Wright says, but because of the implications of what he says:

What is the gospel? What is the good explicit, and what is the bad implicitly, in the 'good' of good news?
What is salvation? 

These are such fundamental questions...

It's really hard to set aside my preconceptions

Reader(s), I've been trying to read the book fairly. I stated early on in the process that I'm reading this book because I have long had a hunch that part of its legacy is unhelpful in our understanding and practice of mission. So I'm inherently biased - I can't pretend otherwise! - but I am trying to read it fairly. 

One of the components of my hunch has been to do with the problem of continuity and discontinuity, and the contribution of Old Testament theology to the whole Bible picture of mission. I need to state clearly that I am a staunch supporter of reading the Old Testament, and I'm often frustrated when it's routinely ignored in preaching programmes or in an individual's reading. The New doesn't trump the Old, but fulfils it.

One reason why I've been concerned about Wright's treatment of things is that the Old seems to be co-opted to make a case that the New doesn't. Here's the most recent instance (forgive me if I'm just misunderstanding him):

'The new creation will preserve the rich diversity of the original creation, but purged of the sin-laden effects of the Fall. [Amen!] Or, the mission of God is not merely the salvation of innumerable souls but specifically the healing of the nations.' (p 456)

It seems to me this language is slightly pejorative, and another way in which he's reacting against an over-individualised, western evangelical subculture. 

And yet, is it not clearly the case, in the unfolding story of the church in the New Testament, that God does deal entirely with individuals? (Or at the largest scale with families - this isn't the place to argue about paedobaptism!!!) Where do we see nations as whole nations being approached, in the way that many of the prophets of Old declared God's verdicts or promises to whole nations (think Ezekiel, Jonah, Obadiah, Jeremiah etc)

Now this is a minor point in some ways - Chris Wright isn't resting a huge weight on this one plank. However, on page 462 we see the following summary:

• If it were not the case that all nations stand under the impending judgement of God, there would be no need to proclaim the gospel.
• But if it were not for the fact that God deals in mercy and forgiveness with all who repent, there would be no gospel to proclaim.

Isn't that exactly right? I raise this because if I was to be constructing a theology of mission, it would most certainly revolve around the proclamation of the gospel (why, how, when, what it is, what it isn't, where it comes from, why it's necessary and so on). And yet the previous 400 pages have to an extent been about deconstructing this (in my view) fundamental issue. I've come away with the impression that to centralise the proclamation of the gospel as a unique or primary or exclusive or foundational (pick your adjective) task is to truncate the gospel and to be reductionistic about mission. But here in chapter 14 (God and the Nations in Old Testament Vision), we have exactly this summary suggesting that the gospel and its proclamation is central. Somehow. 

It's more than possible I've just read the book badly, or that my limited ability to hold it together in overview means that I've misunderstood points he's making or I've read my own bias too easily into it.

I suppose one conclusion from all this is that we are largely on the same page. But it's those little bits on other pages that I think are proving troublesome and about which I'm increasingly concerned. We're almost at the end and I'll nail my colours to the mast soon!

The Mission of God and my own hobby horses!

Dawn often ribs me gently (joining in a long line of others who rib me...) about how I have a Bible that only really has three or four books in it. While not quite on the level or in the style of the heretic Marcion, who dispensed deliberately with most of the Old Testament, it is true that I return disproportionately often to certain books. Generously, my Bible consists of Ezra and Malachi and the Old, and Mark, Ephesians, 2 Timothy and Titus in the New. The Ezra inclusion is the legacy of my friend Andy in Beeston, with whom I read it properly for the first time in the gloriously sunny spring of 2000 on the grassy banks outside Nottingham University's Portland Building. Titus makes it in because it's a short little letter, ideal for reading 1-2-1 with students when you want to complete a series and it's difficult to plan months of meetings. I must have read it with dozens of students, individually and in small groups.

Why this reminiscence?

My Biblical hermeneutic has been shaped over the years mostly by influences from UCCF and the Proclamation Trust, and Andy Gemmill, our former pastor at Beeston Free Church. It's therefore unsurprising that the main questions in my mind with Biblical texts, large or small, are these three:
1. Where does this book fit into the whole Bible?
2. What did the author want me take from it? (i.e. why is it in the Bible?)
3. How is it about Jesus?

(This is just a very quick thought off the top of my head by the way.)

So anyway, I've been wondering a couple of things about this comprehensive book of Wright's that I've almost finished, and poor old Ezra doesn't make it in to the scripture index. This isn't surprising, but I do feel sorry for the guy. When I get to the New Jerusalem I'm definitely going to search him out for a chat because his queue might be shorter. But what does his little, odd, obscure-ish book contribute to our thinking about mission? About the mission of God?

Well, at the very least it puts a very strong emphasis on God's priority for his people to be his people. End of story. The Hebrews exiled in Babylon are brought back to Jerusalem and reconstituted as his people in his land under his rule. That is God's purpose. I'll suggest that it's his mission. (Something that I think is seriously lacking in Wright's book: an emphasis on God's mission being to seek, save and keep his people, now and for eternity).

Put it this way: in the book of Ezra, I'm thinking that really all we see in terms of what God wants to see happening, is that his people live as his people. They do not seem to have a long list of concerns, a wide variety of tasks to accomplish. Just the one. Be the people of God.

And then my other hobby horse - Titus. Titus gets three mentions in the index - chapter 2:9-14 ish - but interestingly none of them pick up on the purpose part of those verses, which I think is both clear and crucial: that God sent Jesus to redeem a people to be his own. That's a purpose statement. It's a mission statement. The contribution of these verses to Wright's argument is to do with the living out good lives to adorn the gospel, which is of course vitally important. But there's a more fundamental purpose behind that adorning, which is so that the gospel goes out faithfully in order to actually do the redeeming work in the first place, in order that God's people be found, called, saved and so on. What that people do follows on from what God does first, and they are distinct movements.

I am convinced that a theology of mission that doesn't have a controlling, central place for the gospel word and the proclamation (teaching/speaking/gossiping/discussing etc - this isn't an apologetic for the primacy of the pulpit) but at least moves in the direction of evangelism and teaching being one amongst many activities that make up God's mission is problematic. And I just don't believe we see that in the New Testament at all.