This Is Really Not Important
Posted: 27/04/2012 Filed under: This Is Not Important Leave a comment »If you’ve not yet seen it, or realised it is happening, you should check out the videos my friend Tim and I are making about our trip to America. Sometimes, they’re funny: Tim And Dave Do America
Going Through The Motions
Posted: 20/04/2012 Filed under: This Is Not Important | Tags: Christianity, Christians, Church, faith, going through the motions, worship 2 Comments »
I had a thought at church last Sunday. Well, I had many, but I thought this one worthy of passing on.
I was fairly busy during that particularly service, and really struggled to engage with the service, and God. I feel no compunction about this, as sometimes, these things happen, and that’s OK. I didn’t feel like straining to experience God in a fresh and exciting way an giving myself a hernia in the process. So I went through the motions slightly, and possibly looked slightly bored to those around me. Yet, my totally original and important point is that just because someone looks like they are engaging with the service and God doesn’t mean they are (I speak as someone who has perfected the art of the well-timed hand raise, convincing those around me that I am holy after all.) By the same token, someone who looks bored and disinterested may be in fact wrestling with the great mysteries of our faith.
It is not important how we look in church, just as it never was important to wash/dress/eat right in Jesus’ time.
Sabbath, by Dan B. Allender
Posted: 31/03/2012 Filed under: This Is Not Important Leave a comment »Sabbath is a book that tries to expel the myths about the Sabbath by asking some pertinent questions: what is it? Why is it? When is it, and so on. The purpose of the book is to bring the reader around to the idea that the Sabbath is not just a day of rest, but a day of celebration; that there is more to life than merely going through, day by day, week by week, and attempting to turn up to church one day out of seven.
I found this book difficult – not because of the subject matter, which I found interesting and helpful – but because of the style of Allender’s writing. The blurb describes it as ‘lyrical,’ which is a fair description. Perhaps it is just my impatient nature, but the style of the writing made the book slow going for me. Maybe this is a good thing – what Allender writes about is to be chewed upon and meditated over, not sped through and glanced at.
The book is split into three parts, which are essentially the following: what makes the Sabbath what it is? Why is the Sabbath what it is? And how do we respond to the Sabbath? Allender is an expert story-teller who brings alive these questions with experiences and events. Yet, when reading it, it didn’t feel as if I was being shown how I could experience the Sabbath. This almost seemed intentional – like Allender was trying to avoid prescribing his Sabbath for the reader – but it then became difficult to understand how Allender’s experiences in his life could be interpreted.
I would heartily recommend this book, despite the struggles I had with it. It opens ideas and thoughts that many people would not consider, and Allender’s obvious desire to communicate the joy of the Sabbath makes it worth the read.
Sounding Good
Posted: 03/01/2012 Filed under: This Is Not Important Leave a comment »
This is a blog borne out of painful personal experience, as recently as this weekend.
Think back to those times when you’ve been in church, and you stand up, ready to sing your little heart out, the musicians launch into your favourite psalm, hymn or spiritual song, and then, for want of a better phrase, they completely cock it up.
We’ve all been there, and grown irate with musicians as they not only murder the song, but bludgeon the still warm body into an unrecognisable state with the butt end of a microphone stand and Songs of Fellowship Book 3.
Even worse, when an incompetent sound man (or woman) gets something wrong, presses the incorrect button, or slides the wrong slider. I say this is worse because with a band getting it wrong, it’s horribly obvious what’s gone wrong, and whose fault it is. With the sound desk, only the chosen few have any idea what’s going on, and unscrupulous sound engineers in churches up and down the country can blame their own ineptitude on technical difficulties.
When music goes wrong, it grates. When music that is supposed to somehow point towards something heavenly goes wrong, it grates even more. As a musician, I can’t abide getting it wrong; I feel like I’m letting the band down, letting the congregation down, and mostly, letting God down.
Because our music has to sound good, right? It’s our pathetically human attempt to respond to God, in one of the most common art forms available to man: we better try and make it at least acceptable. In the Bible, there’s talk of offering God the best, making sure the first born, and the first harvest are given to him. Why would we offer our second best when it comes to music?
I suspect the best way to understand it is to think about a child’s drawing. The bodies are wrong, the people represented are clearly not those colours, and the sky is… well, what IS that? Yet I suspect, the parent of this budding artist could see the time, effort, concentration and love that had gone into this masterpiece.
In a similar way, sounding good doesn’t matter. Because I think that God is like a parent who dotes over his children’s efforts to show their love. Yes, the Bible talks about first fruits and so on, but it also talks about obedience being better than doing or saying or sounding ‘good.’
On Sunday night, all the things that could have gone wrong with the music, did. But as much as I struggled, because I wanted it to sound good, I doubt God cared. It’s less about the sound, and more about the heart. Because, in the end, as one flippant member of the band (who wasn’t me) said: ‘Well, at least we’re cocking it up for Jesus.’
Some People I Like
Posted: 21/12/2011 Filed under: This Is Not Important | Tags: blogging, blogs, favourites, This Is Not Important Leave a comment »Sometimes, one has to accept that you are only an insignificant pawn in the grand scheme of things, and that there are other, greater beings than you, that you should point towards. Accordingly, here is a list of some blogs that I enjoy for a variety of reasons:
In Love With The Sound of Your Voice - this is my best friend, and as such, I feel I need to put him near the top. Or, at the top. He writes about things he has been reading, (very) occasionally about his novel, and about the success, or lack of, his diet.
Miriam Kendrick - another delightful person that I am honoured to count as a friend. She draws lovely little comics about her existential angst and getting things wrong and her day dreams. However, she’s no longer unemployed like me, so I sniff in her general direction. Still, the comics are funny.
Faith Palm – Faith Palm does what I would do if I had the ability to take humorous pictures from around the internet and point the idiocy of religious people in succinct fashion.
The General Dance - Tim is a very clever man who writes about things that matter.
Jesus Needs New PR - The daddy of all good poking-fun-at-Christians blogs. It approaches things from a very American point of view, but that’s OK. Christians are weirder, and therefore funnier, the other side of the pond.
This concludes this weeks list. I’ll write again next week about some people I like less.
Being Right
Posted: 19/12/2011 Filed under: This Is Not Important | Tags: Being Right, Christianity, Christians, Church, Do Right BJU, This Is Not Important Leave a comment »
One of the greatest failures, I think, of the Church and Christians over the centuries has been an inability to accept when we are wrong. We mix up the fact that we attempt, in our rather bumbling way, to point towards the ultimate truth, with the idea that we have the ultimate truth. Of course, when we talk about truth we use the language of ‘having.’ But ‘having’ the truth implies that we have a strong handle on it, that it’s an easily domesticated thing. Truth, like Aslan, is not tame.
And so, in being so connected to what we believe is the truth, I think we forget that we are not always right. We feel the need to be right: in arguments; in doctrine; in church style; in myriad other ways. But being right is not as important as doing right.
I take my lead from an American Fundamentalist Bible College, Bob Jones University. Or rather, a rather small segment of students from said university, who were protesting the fact that a member of the board of governors was, when a pastor of a church, allegedly part of the covering up of a forcible rape of a minor, while ‘disciplining’ the girl involved. You can read the full story about Tina Anderson here, and the news of the protest here.
While this is obviously an horrific example, the point I am trying to make is that being right and doing right are two completely different things. If we are so concerned with being right, we miss out vital opportunities to do right. And I am slowly coming to the realisation that I would rather be wrong about something, if I was doing right to the last, the lost and the least.
Megachurches
Posted: 15/12/2011 Filed under: This Is Not Important | Tags: Christianity, Christians, Church, megachurches, This Is Not Important 1 Comment »Recently, I read a blog entitled ‘Megachurches Do It Better‘, by Shane Raynor. It’s a thought-provoking piece about the efficacy of megachurches. In sum: large churches who spend lots of money on refurbishment or property are in fact more effective, because per person, they spend less, and therefore have more money for ‘service and mission.’ Also, they ‘probably spend less on clergy salaries per member than small churches,’ and have more staff, so the leaders can focus upon specific areas of ministry. Furthermore, megachurches have more resources to reach out to the community, so accordingly have more impact than smaller churches.
I feel he argues well, makes his point, and reminds the reader of the good things that megachurches can do.
But (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?) the argument is based on one main idea: megachurches are efficient.
When I think about church, and how little Jesus said about how to organise them, I rarely think that efficiency is the order of the day. Efficiency suggests business, profit margins, and ‘bang for your buck’ – a term used in Shane’s blog. I’m not trying to suggest that we should all make sure our churches are shoddily organised, patchily staffed and badly managed - churches already do that far too well without me telling them so.
Efficiency is clearly not a bad thing. A lot of churches the world over could do with being a little more efficient with their time and money. Yet as the one reason you can dredge up against the ‘evils’ of megachurches, I think it’s a little weak. Megachurches, of course, have the money and the resources to do great things, and reach out to so many different sections of society. But imagine if the resources centred on one church or town, were spread out over numerous local churches or towns. Of course, you would then run the risk of people not doing what you want done with the money, or even worse, having to talk to other Christians.
But that is the beauty of the Church. Paul describes the Church as a body. And the thing about a body is that it has to work together. You may be vaguely aware that 2000 years has seen us endeavour to not work together, and to disagree on every last point, and dress all that up as being Biblical, but fundamentally, we’re a body. A dysfunctional, double jointed, all-too-ready-to-chop-off-some-extremities body, undoubtedly with two left feet, but a body nonetheless.
Earlier this year, I came across a really good example of how a large church can have a positive impact upon smaller, local churches. Every year, St George’s Leeds gets in a crop of interns: young people who have normally just come out of university, and are willing to do anything for a warm bed and some pocket money. Now, St George’s is growing, and is having a really positive impact upon Leeds. It could recruit a plebery of interns (the official plural, don’t you know) and put them all to good use within St George’s. Yet what the church actually chooses to do is send some of those interns out to other, local parishes without any cost to the receiving church. St George’s trains and guides them, and smaller churches get the time and effort of a fresh-faced and enthusiastic intern.
I am very slowly warming to the idea of megachurches – and when I say that, I mean as slowly as the Roman Catholics are warming to prophylactics. But it takes all sorts to make up the body of Christ. As the famous philosopher once said:
You’ve got big ones, small ones, and some as big as your head.
That was about churches, right?
A Preach
Posted: 13/12/2011 Filed under: This Is Not Important | Tags: Christianity, Christians, Church, language, preach as a noun, preaching, This Is Not Important 2 Comments »I am about to share with you something very personal. No, not one of those personal things, fear not. I have no intention of sitting you down and telling you I’ve become a lesbian. Or worse, a Methodist. This is just a personal bug bear that truly fits the chosen name of this blog, as it has no import in the real world whatsoever. And yet, this is my blog, and despite this being a massive whine about said unimportant thing, I hope it will still entertain.
.jpg "'To assist me in my preach today, I shall enlist the help of some shadow puppets...'")
My problem is this: the use of the word ‘preach’ as a noun.
As in, “I totally astounded them all with my preach on 1 Kings 22:38, about how the dogs licked up the blood. They were lapping it up.”
In the last 10 or so years, the use of ‘preach’ as a noun has burgeoned. I find this quite odd as it has replaced, in some Christian circles, the completely acceptable ‘sermon,’ which in turn has replaced the slightly archaic, but more poetic ‘homily’. Standing somewhere on the sidelines is bastard son of such a great art, but still no less reasonable: the ‘talk’. I don’t know why ‘preach’ has become acceptable. It’s not. It’s a verb.
As some of the last guardians of the spoken word, orators within the church should be doing more to protect our language from such crude and thoughtless vandalism. A preach?! Preaching, preached, he/she/it preaches: fine. I’m even happy with the word ‘preach’ as a verb, used on occasions in conjunction with the Pentecostal Yelp™: ‘PREACH IT, BROTHER! AMEN!’
To my ears, it just sounds like trying just a little too hard. I can understand replacing words with more suitable ones, particularly if the original word is now deemed offensive (see ‘spastic’ or ‘retarded’). Yet if the word is non-offensive, and does a good job of defining the object in question, why change it? It’s not even like using the word ‘preach’ as a noun helps: it’s a clunky phrase that puts me in mind of an advertising consultant, (or any other pointless, pretend job) spouting business jargon.
So, a plea to all Christians everywhere who use the term ‘preach’ – and I’m not going to point any fingers for legal reasons, but I know a handful of people who use said phrase in a church network that we’re going to call “Few Nontiers” – please stop it. Just stop it. It would make the world an audibly better place, and I would no longer be slaughtering these small fluffy animals to quell my rage.
——
I’m sure there are plenty of other words that annoy you within the little Christian bubble. Do please take this opportunity to confide in one of our trained counsellors (…me) and I’ll endeavour to write a searing blog about the words that annoy us most.
That is, if I agree with you.
How To Do Faith
Posted: 12/12/2011 Filed under: This Is Not Important | Tags: Christianity, CS Lewis, doubt, faith, Jesus, Screwtape Letters Leave a comment »You may have wondered why I have not written anything in a few weeks. You probably haven’t, given the small amount of traffic this blog was getting. But you may have done, and I’m going to address that potentiality.
I had a massive crisis of faith a few weeks ago. It came from a variety of sources, but they were mostly seeking to discredit the Bible, and the faith that is built around the Bible. Now, intellectual challenges are to be welcomed – one of the reasons I studied theology was so I could actually get my head around awkward things I hear or read. But sometimes events conspire to make you wonder, to pull the rug under your feet, and you can see yourself falling, coccyx first, into a muddy puddle of doubt.
But rather than dismissing doubt, I held onto it. You might think that’s odd. I would agree with you. What the heck was I, a theology graduate, a former church worker, a (very) potential ordinand and, most importantly, a follower of Jesus, doing allowing myself to doubt?
Well, I doubted because I did not want to do faith.
I know how to do faith. I know what it looks like, how it works in a church community, what things to say to pass off doubt as faith, or even worse, passing off doubt as a spiritual trial, which makes one look practically saint-like.
But I did not want to do faith.
I wanted to have faith.
Over the last few days, I have read The Screwtape Letters. In one of the earlier letters, Screwtape points out the law of Undulation. Every area of our lives is subject to undulation, be it work, love, or friendships, and accordingly, our faith. This is not a bad thing.
[God] leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
I find myself now, a few weeks on, back to a sort of plateau. I have undulated back to a place of slight discomfort: holding onto both doubts and faith and hoping that God can work out what he can use. Because I’ve discovered that my faith is not a doctrine to which I should adhere, but a fluid, living organism that sometimes needs more care taken over it than usual.
Doubt is not a bad thing. Nor are questions, difficult patches, challenges, or dark nights of the soul. In fact, they are important. They remind us of the importance of faith. Of ritual. Of liturgy. Of looking round upon a universe from which every trace of God has vanished, asking why we have been forsaken, and still obeying.
The Good Shirt Shop II
Posted: 28/10/2011 Filed under: This Is Not Important | Tags: Christian Merchandise, Christian t-shirts, Christianity, Christians, The Good Shirt Shop, This Is Not Important 1 Comment »We return to our weekly theme of awful Christian merchandise, and again, we come to t-shirts. Why? Because they’re abysmal, to be quite frank. Brace yourself.
1. Where to start? Let’s take ‘Jehovah’s Fitness.’ A ‘play’ on the phrase ‘Jehovah’s Witness.’ Har-har. I’m as appreciative of puns as the next person (probably more so, given the next person’s dislike of puns and finely crafted wordplays, and my love of such humour) but usually when they have a point. But no, let’s withhold judgement just for a moment, because maybe the next sentence will clarify things:
‘Sprinting for Jesus.’
It didn’t. Not only did it not clarify it, it muddies the waters like a cross-country runner’s post-race bath. I’m well aware that we followers of Jesus are to live out whole life discipleship, and that we should aim to honour God in all we do: sprinting; pie-eating; all the categories in between. But what exactly does ‘sprinting for Jesus’ mean? I’m not sure this is something he particularly laid down in any of his teaching, unless I missed the chapter on ‘Jesus Speaks To The Local Athletics Club.’
2. This has good and bad elements. Let’s go for the bad first, and try and end on a happy note.
First, you will, at first glance, look like a prize tool wearing this t-shirt. People will stare at you extra funny, and in such a way you can’t begin to think that it’s your dashing good looks that are attracting glances. You run the risk of people assuming that you view yourself as a bastion of perfection, better than others, and altogether smug.
However, the more I think about this t-shirt, the more clever it is. The wearer, presumably, will be a normal person, one for whom perfection is a long way off. It would still garner unpleasant and plentiful looks, but the point about it being worn by someone who is less than holy, yet still fits the bill of being a ‘christian’ is a good one. We are just normal, every day, uncool, broken and failing people. This IS what a Christian looks like.
3. My one big question with this t-shirt is: ‘WHAT?!’
I actually don’t understand. This isn’t really a Christian t-shirt, is it? I can think of a few places in the world where this slogan would be useful, and aside from the phrase ‘Oh, God!’ being uttered in both, I can think of very few similarities with churches or Christian institutions.
It’s not even a phrase taken from the Bible, and considering it’s found in the woman’s section in The Good Shirt Shop (yes, those ARE shadows), it’s not a t-shirt for over-zealous and theologically-dubious males regarding their home life.
If anyone could shed any light on this… thing, I’d appreciate it.
I think my work is done here. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend.
