connexions

I nearly spat coffee over my Mac this morning when I opened up my feedreader. Somebody at the BBC is having a laugh with this headline.

Of course, none of my blogging friends would think of posting something like this. Except Randy, obviously. I bet he enjoys ‘Carry On’ films as much as I do, too.

Dave Walker picks up on new research which shows a terrifying decline in the British church. He accompanies this disheartening news with a very cheery cartoon which I urge you to look at.

There’s nothing new about any of this, of course. Certainly we’ve talked about the decline of the church here before, and no doubt we will again. I don’t know what the answer to this decline is, but I know where the answer is: in the grace and power of God to save and restore his people. There isn’t a clever programme, scheme, form of worship or church government that will magically turn things around. There just isn’t. And to those who say that it isn’t the whole church that’s declining in Britain and who point to churches with rapidly increasing congregations I’m bound to ask: where is that growth coming from. In my limited experience, not from ‘the unchurched’, but from people who already have affiliations with other congregations. To my way of thinking, you can only regard that as growth if you think of different congregations as competing businesses selling the same product.

I know I’m repeating myself here, but we really do have to look at the church in the wider context of society. I was talking to a Labour Party activist earlier this week about the struggle they had in a big British city to get people canvassing the streets as the recent elections approached. Half a dozen people spread over a number of council wards! And all the parties are in the same position. I’ve mentioned the closure of pubs before, a fact which I think is highly relevant. Set that alongside the plight of other groups and voluntary organisations — almost every membership group I can think of is struggling for people. The ones that buck the trend are those such as the National Trust and RSPB that require nothing more from their members than an annual cheque or Direct Debit. What this tells me is that the work we have to do is not principally in the church, but in wider society, working to reverse the tide of individualism that is sweeping us.

Which is not to say that there are not changes to be made in the church. Perhaps the first of them should be to take Dave’s advice and empty the church voluntarily: so that we can have a party outside.

Bene Diction has a say about Todd Bentley.
Update: Mark Byron share his two penn’orth.

Mr John Cooper makes a welcome return to the blogosphere. Go over there and wish him well.

The post I wrote about Todd Bentley the other day has brought in lots of visitors via Google: clearly a lot of people are looking for information about about what is happening in Florida. Equally clearly this is stirring up very strong passions in people. On the one hand, any questioning of what is going on in Florida is regarded by some as ’stifling the Spirit’ and working against a movement of God. On the other hand, there are those, many of them conservative evangelicals, who look on Mr Bentley as the spawn of Satan. (This sort of fight isn’t new, of course, and gives the lie to any suggestion that evangelicalism can be simply defined or regarded as a single monolithic block).

Where do I stand? I don’t want to be uncharitable, but there is a considerable amount of stuff about this ministry that I find distinctly questionable and little if anything that I could commend. I’ve got no doubt that God can work through all this — he moves in mysterious ways, after all — but what I see is a lot of showmanship, many unsubstantiated claims, a great deal of shouting and no substantial presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I call that a serious flaw in an evangelist.

The role of a preacher or evangelist is to offer the Good News of God to people. If the evangelist ends up presenting himself, something is going wrong. Todd Bentley remembers to say that it is God working the miracles, not him, but his whole demeanour makes himself the centre of attention. Todd Bentley is the one in control, with his shouting and pushing. God appears to do as he is told.

Very big claims are being made in Florida. How hard would it be to provide some authentication? I don’t say this cynically (honest!). But I recall that when Jesus healed a leper he instructed him to go and present himself to the priest and fulfill the requirements of the law.

Finally, I find it very telling that there are friends of this blog living within spitting distance of Todd Bentley’s activities who hadn’t heard about him through their local media. I find it very hard to believe that miracles on the scale being claimed could go unnoticed or unreported. But maybe that’s just me.

Inhabitatio Dei asks a good question: What does ‘evangelical’ mean?

There are, I think few more contested definitions than those applied to the term ‘evangelical.’ However, attempting to define evangelicalism in a precise or pleasing way is, I think, not all that important. What is important, however, is to know how people who use the term understand it. So, with that in mind, let me hear it. What do you think of when you think of the word ‘evangelical’? At the lowest level, what does such an epitaph conjure up on your mind?

Don’t tell me. Tell him.

Here’s a video of Todd Bentley talking with Bob Jones and Patricia King. What comes out here sounds more like the dodgier end of the ‘new age’ movement that Biblically-based faith to me, but you make your own mind up.

Fat Prophet and Mark Byron both comment on the ‘Florida revival’ being led by Todd Bentley. The revival meetings are being broadcast on God TV (cheesy music warning!), so I’ve seen a bit of this myself.

Mark avoids ‘taking sides’

I’m mugwumping on the theological merits of this. It’s hard to get objective information; you either have the Holy Spirit junkies who can’t get enough of Bentley and this “Florida Outpouring” or you have the heresy-hunters who train both barrels at anything charismatic and noteworthy.

What we do seem to have is something that could be the Toronto of the late 00s; TACF had to buy a conference center and convert it into a church to handle their crowds.

At least people will have better weather to visit this revival in. We’ll see how the charismatic pilgrims handle the “air you can wear” of a Florida summer.

FP is skeptically supportive and would be keen to get your comments at his blog

The other thing that amazes me is that people are travelling from across the world to Florida to be part of the anointing - there was a pastor there from England the other day when I switched on and he said that he had been watching on the TV at home in England and just felt he wanted to be part of this move of God.
I have over the years in pentecostal churches I have attended seen God move in peoples lives in a very tangible way and it would seem that this is happening in the Todd Bentley meeting so perhaps it is just me being a little sceptical due to my stiff British Upper Lip or of course it could be that I have some concern about the building up of peoples hopes in respect of being healed.

If you don’t have the delights of cable or satellite (or maybe lack the strange inclination to watch God TV), here’s a sample:

My take? Let’s say I have FP’s skepticism. If anyone wants to get me a ticket to Florida, I’d love to do a day or two’s blogging about this.

Jesus — the name high over all,
in hell or earth or sky;
angels and men before it fall,
and devils fear and fly.

Jesus — the name to sinners dear,
The name to sinners given!
It scatters all their guilty fear,
it turns their hell to heaven.

Jesus — the prisoner’s fetters breaks,
And bruises Satan’s head;
Power into strengthless souls it speaks,
And life unto the dead.

O that the world might taste and see
the riches of his grace!
The arms of love that compass me
Would all mankind embrace.

His only righteousness I show,
his saving grace proclaim;
’tis all my business here below
to cry, “Behold the Lamb!”

Happy, if with my latest breath
I might but gasp his name,
Preach him to all and cry in death,
“Behold, behold the Lamb!”

Charles Wesley

How Star Wars should have ended:

I thought Wii Sports was good. Well, it is.

But Wii Fit is the business. The fellow who thought of using a balance board as a game controller is a genius.

I like to keep half an eye on places where I’ve lived purely for purposes of nostalgia (which, it has to be said, is not what it used to be). Inn the past this would have been quite difficult, but now, thanks to RSS feeds, Google News alerts and so on, it is quite easy.

The elections have thrown up two interesting and disturbing stories from my old Flintshire stomping ground. First, I read that one of my former neighbours has been elected as a Conservative councillor to the County Council. That in itself isn’t very interesting, but I remember when Alison Halford joined the Labour Party. Local activists were thrilled because of her notoriety, and she rose to prominence very quickly. She became a County Councillor and was then elected in 1999 as a Member of the Welsh Assembly for the Labour Party. That someone can make the switch between Labour and Conservative (or indeed vice versa) is hard for me, simple soul that I am, to get my head around.

I also read that the BNP’s national treasurer John Walker has taken a seat on Hawarden Community Council, though he failed in a bid for the Flintshire authority. Whatever they may say, the local elections were not (praise be!) a great success for the BNP, but any gains are a worry and especially in a community that I loved very much.

While I was a student at Queen’s I lived for a time in the Sparkbrook area of Birmingham. It was a very exciting place to live — largely populated by Muslim immigrants from Pakistan. It is Sparkbrook that is the original source of the Balti. I have happy memories of doing school assemblies with a college friend in a school where the pupils were almost entirely Muslim, and of getting caught up in some pretty intense theological conversations while out Eid visiting. (There are things about my time in Sparkbrook that I’d rather draw a veil over, but I needn’t bore you with those.) The Methodist Church in neighbouring Sparkhill was my spiritual home during my college years and what I learned there was at least as important as what they taught me in college.

Anyway, I was fascinated to read the other day of a row that’s been set off in the community by billboards advertising discount clothes retailer Matalan. The posters showed three smiling ladies modelling bikinis, causing offense to many residents.

I confess to having very mixed feelings about how this should be handled. On the one hand, it is important to respect the sensitivities of local communities. On the other, I don’t think that there was anything sexually provocative about the posters and the vast majority of the British people would probably barely notice them as they drove or walked by. (Mind you, my dad would certainly have had something to say and attitudes to this sort of thing have definitely relaxed over recent years.)

What do you think? How do we accommodate the mores of minority groups when these are at odds with wider society?

Lastly, I’m delighted that Swansea have ended the football season with a 1-0 victory and been confirmed as League One Champions. Good luck to the club and their ‘Jack Army’ for their next season in the Championship.

Britain has woken up to a very different political map this morning. The votes in yesterday’s local elections are still being counted, but it seems that Labour have returned their worst Council results in 40 years, with gains for the Tories and not much change for the Lib-Dems. One surprise to me is that it sounds like Boris Johnson is set to take over from Ken Livingstone as Mayor of London. The results for Swansea haven’t been declared yet, but it looks as though the Lib-Dems are going to stay on in power despite some notable local fiascos. What usually happens on the day after elections is that every party is able to claim some sort of victory. Not this time. All of the Labour politicians that I’ve heard interviewed did no more than admit that these results are dreadful, and that they’re going to have to pull their fingers out to have any chance at all in a General Election.

Which raises the distinctly nasty prospect of a return to Tory government here. Oh, joy.

Dave Walker’s cartoon was exactly right for our annual church meeting last night. I came away feeling very encouraged.

I’ve got an elderly PC that’s been gathering dust a while. Thought I’d try to give it a new lease of life with a Linux installation.

Everyone raves about Ubuntu, so I thought I’d give that a go. It installed! It did it s-l–ooo–wl–y, mind. But it got there in the end. I could scarcely believe it. Trouble was, when I rebooted the computer it took me straight to a login screen *without* giving me the option to create any users. That’s not good.

Xubuntu did its best, but didn’t like the look of the hard drive and wouldn’t have anything to do with it.

Debian installed like a charm. Splendid! Only trouble was, it didn’t seem to install a GUI and left me looking at a text prompt. I played with vi for a bit, but it wasn’t really what I was hoping for.

Damn Small Linux came close. It installed splendidly and appeared to work. But it wouldn’t talk to the ethernet card, so couldn’t connect to the net. So that’s no good.

I’ve tried a number of other “distros”. Mepis. Crux. Zenwalk. So far, no luck.

But I’m doing my best, Linux fans. I really am.

Update 2/5/09: I’m pleased that the problems I’ve had with Linux all seem to be related to the computer I’ve been trying to use: I’m updating this post from Ubuntu 8 running from a live CD on the church laptop. Hurrah!

If you’ve a vote in the elections today, don’t forget to use it. It’s a privilege and a duty.

On that theme, our friend the esteemed Mr John Cooper has re-written a Christmas hymn for the occasion.

How many minutes to heaven, indeed. That’s seems to have become the “study notes” sum of Christianity. What’s the quickest route? The safest? The most scenic?

I can analyze one of the key misunderstandings of the faith in even less than ten minutes, however. It seems that my paycheck (American pastors don’t get “stipends” — that’s so socialist, after all) was waiting for me when I came onto the job today (I punched the clock a little late today — but that’s really a matter to be addressed through the employee handbook, as American pastors don’t have covenant ministry responsibilities, but efficiency quotas to meet). You see, one of the key misunderstandings has to do with adapting the faith to a capitalist understanding of production, efficiency, and output. That means that God’s grace produces or manufactures Christians.

That requires, though, that human understandings of “salvation” be welded at the right place and in the right way along the assembly line. Transformation is out, for it suggests corporate salvation, the notion that redemption is anything other than personal. It suggests a universalism that denigrates the merit system by which a society rises or falls. And how did a theology supposedly rooted in “saved by grace” become wedded to a secular business model of merit? After today’s personal lesson, pardon the pun, it seems clear that a human bias about time and space has warped our theological understandings.

Since arriving in Stroud last June, my measuring stick for planning has been that it takes 10 minutes to get to the bank, or 20 minutes roundtrip. This necessitates that for efficiency of my “work” schedule, I must frequently elect to drive my personal vehicle.

But the Bible promises that we shall know the truth and it shall set us free. Today, out of curiosity perhaps, I decided to use the stopwatch mode on my time piece. Now the evidence is overwhelming that my production system has been based on a flawed premise — the ten minute rule, as in “T” is for “ten” which if I weren’t Wesleyan might change the meaning of a “tulip.”

Alas, in reality, it only takes 3 minutes and 6 seconds to walk to the bank. Thus, allowing for a pleasant but efficient one minute chat with the teller, my round trip is actually two minutes and 48 seconds less than my committed “one way” rule of ten minutes. And that bias toward ten has invalidated everything else, for if that one rule is wrong, then the entirety of the gospel I understand must be wrong. Those missing 168 seonds have infected the whole of my belief and I must spend the rest of my life accounting for them. That leaves time only for my personal salvation because transformation requires recalculation for the masses, and that is too messy and inefficent.

So, if you are counting on how many minutes it is to heaven, you might want to rethink how long it takes to make it to the bank. Further, you better walk alone; there’s no way to accurately or efficently predict the exact minutes if you walk with your friends, as well as the widows, the orphans and the strangers in the land. That’s just too messy a calculation, particularly if humans are to do the accounting.

Joel Betow
Stroud, Oklahoma USA

I’ve mentioned this preacher before and because of that made the mistake of clicking the ‘play’ button when I saw the video above on Paul Martin’s site. So I thought I’d share the opportunity to make the same mistake with you.

He’s very pleased with his rhetoric, this preacher. And he doesn’t like homosexuals. Oh no.

Hacking Christianity:

The United Methodist Church at General Conference 2008 just voted to no longer make disciples of Jesus Christ.

In other words, the mission statement of the UMC was previously “to make disciples of Jesus Christ.”

Now the UMC’s mission statement is “To make disciples of Jesus Christ for the Transformation of the World.”

This is a good mission.hack. Why? Because it is utterly Wesleyan in that our discipleship leads us to act. We are not a passive people, we are a people with a blessing that requires that we pass it on. Like a cup overflowing with God’s love, now our mission statement reflects that discipleship must bubble up out of us in acts of mercy and justice.

May all congregations adopt this mentality of connecting faith with action.

Good stuff.

From Searchlight Cymru

via Matt Withers