The Last Sermon...

No, this isn’t a written transcript if the last sermon that I’m going to preach or anything like that.  Hopefully I have many years of preaching to come and hundreds of sermons to deliver.  No, what I’m referring to is something else entirely.

I was listening to Radio 4 this morning whilst making my breakfast when I heard the singer Christy Moore say that every time he goes out on stage to perform in a concert he reminds himself that this could be the last concert somebody attends and that inspires him to give the very best performance that he can.

This made me think about leading worship and preaching.  Should I bear in mind, as I am leading worship and preaching, that this may be the last service one of the congregation who is present will attend?  Should I keep in mind that by the following Sunday any of them could be experiencing with growing wonder and amazement the eternal life of heaven?

I think the answer must be yes.  I think that preachers should preach every sermon as if it is the last sermon they will hear.  Such thoughts should help to inspire us to give of our very best – although the fact that we are preaching God’s word should do that anyway.  The great evangelical preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote ‘to me the work of preaching is the highest and the greatest and the most glorious calling to which anyone can ever be called.’ (Dr Martin Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers [London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971], page 9).  But maybe when we are tired preachers, when we are busy preachers, when we can’t be bothered giving our best effort, maybe it will help to inspire us to give our best to remember that one of our congregation members could be hearing their last sermon ever.

I think we must also remember, as preachers and leaders of worship, that there could be somebody for whom it is their first church service.  That equally should inspire us to do our very best in the service of God, for God may use us to bring that person into his Kingdom as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Its Easy To Criticise.....

A preacher was standing at the church door following the morning service he had taken.  It was his first visit to the church.  As people passed by, shaking his hand, he received the familiar comments;

“Lovely service”

“Nice hymns”

“Good sermon”

Then a fairly scruffy older man took his hand and said, “That was rubbish.  The hymns were terrible and your sermon was too long and very boring.  And as for your prayers…”  The man shuffled away.

A church elder was next in line and the Preacher commented, “It’s nicer to meet somebody who isn’t afraid to express his own opinion.”

The Elder replied, “It’s not his own opinion, I’m afraid.  He just repeats what he has overheard everybody else saying.”

There the story ends, but I imagine that preacher was left feeling quite deflated.  It isn’t easy to hear negative criticism from other people.  Even when it may be justified it can still be hard to hear, it can still upset us and make us feel uneasy or small. 

Sometimes the negative comments are not even justified.  I picked up on a comment on Facebook recently.  A Methodist Local Preacher had adapted one of John Wesley’s forty four sermons, modernising the language and illustrations but keeping to the theology.  A member of the congregation at the door told her that she had based her sermon on false ideas!  Wesley’s forty four sermons are part of the normative doctrine of the Methodist Church.  Some people seem to be negative just for the sake of it.

As a Methodist Local Preacher and now Student Presbyter I have sometimes had to comment on services and sermons delivered by Local Preachers ‘On Note’ and ‘On Trial’ and on other Student Ministers, as well as being commented upon myself.  It has sometimes been necessary to bring a criticism of some aspect of the service or sermon, but I have made it my practice to make at least three positive comments for every negative comment: that way a preacher can improve without feeling utterly crushed or deflated.  I know for myself that if the positive outweighs the negative then I can learn without feeling crushed.

So, a plea to those who shake hands with preachers on a Sunday morning (or evening); by all means tell us if you genuinely think we have got something wrong but please remember to tell us what you liked about the service as well.  We are all brothers and sisters in Christ and the Biblical injunction is not to tear each other down; but to build one another up in love.

Slipping and Sliding Through the Storm

I spent most of Saturday just outside Leyburn on the Yorkshire Dales National Park on a college Marriage & Ministry weekend.  The weekend was great, I learnt a lot and the worship was good.

Setting off for home, though, I was filled with unease.  Tumbling out of the sky were crystal white flakes of snow and as a regular visitor I know that snow in the Dales isn’t good.  The journey between Leyburn and Hawes wasn’t too bad; it was when I got onto the road between Hawes and Ingleton that the problems started.

The snow was coming in thick and fast and very soon the tyre tracks I was following in the road disappeared; as did all the road markings.  I slowed considerably but even then the car was slipping and sliding every time I went round a bend.  I had to apply more power to get up hills to stop my car sliding back and then, of course, coming down the other side things were a little dangerous.  I was probably driving in those conditions for ten minutes or so but it seemed like an eternity.  As I drove I prayed for God to deliver me safely from all accident and harm.  Eventually I emerged from the blizzard and slowly the weather conditions improved until I was driving on a normal wet road surface with just the occasional patch of black ice to make things interesting.  With God’s help I had come safely through the storm.

Reflecting back upon this experience our lives can sometimes seem a lot like that.  We can hit patches where our lives seem to be out of control, where nothing we do seems to make any difference, yet as a Christian I believe that God brings us safely through those times, especially if we turn to him in prayer.

Spending Time with Amos & Micah

I am a human being and I have many faults.  One of these is that I don’t spend enough time reading and thinking about the Old Testament.  I have been preaching for a number of years now and I think I have preached on the Old Testament twice, once for a family service basing the whole thing on ‘Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ and once on a passage from Joshua which was forced on me by college.  I usually preach from the New Testament and nearly always from the gospels.  I have been guilty of putting to one side a good portion of God’s inspired word and even considering it fairly irrelevant, replaced by the New Testament!  How wrong I have been.

For the past week or so I have been immersed in the books of Amos and Micah for an essay I am writing for college and I have been incredibly blessed by studying these prophetic writings in so much detail.  Two verses that particularly stood out, because of their familiarity are; ‘let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream’ (Amos 5:24) and ‘what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God’ (Mic 6:8).  The latter especially really speaks to me in a deep and spiritual way.

In particular I have been looking at understandings of social justice in the two books and have identified the following social justice issues:

• ·        Trading in human beings / slavery of the poor and destitute
• ·        General oppression of the poor and weak
• ·        Perversion of the justice system with the extensive use of bribery
• ·        The sexual abuse of women
• ·        Unjustified taxation targeting the poor rather than the rich
• ·        The abuse of economic arrangements including the use of false weights and measures.

Many of these have a deep resonance with our society today.  Slavery is still an issue in our modern world, even within our own country in the form of foreign girls and women forced to work in the sex trade and in a recent case in the newspapers where Gypsy men were kidnapped and forced to work against their will under threat of violence.  The poor and weak are still oppressed in our society, the rich are still growing richer and the poor are becoming poorer.  Taxation in this country is still unfairly heaped upon the poor who pay a greater share of their income than the rich and well-off.  Our justice system may be free of bribery; but many people cannot afford to pursue justice through the courts with the increasing restrictions on legal aid, denying them the justice they have a right to.  The sexual abuse of women is still common through prostitution.  Finally, whilst false weights and measures are probably not common the economic reality is that our economy benefits the wealthy and big corporations to the detriment of everybody else; farmers having the price paid for their produce squeezed until it barely covers the cost of production being one very isolated example.

The Old Testament is not, as I thought, largely irrelevant.  As much as the New Testament it is the living word of God and can speak to our present situations through the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit as much as the New Testament.  Of course we interpret the Old Testament in light of the New Testament but that does not mean that it does not have much to teach us.

I am glad to have spent the last week or so in the company of Amos and Micah and the God inspired prophecies they gave; they have taught me much; much more than I would have thought possible.

I will be preaching from the Old Testament much more from now on!

The Dinosaurs Will Make Our Churches Extinct!

I return to blogging in angry mode after a few weeks’ break.  The objects of my ire are the dinosaurs in church who want the church to stay the same way that it has always been.

There is a probably apocryphal story of a Church Steward who proudly proclaimed to a new Minister, “I’ve seen many changes over the years and I’ve resisted every single one of them.”

I’ve been hearing stories about church dinosaurs over the past couple of weeks.  I’ve heard of a church that wants to raise a million pounds for their building, not to improve the disabled access or make their building more available for wider use by the community; but to restore it to exactly the state it was in fifty years ago!  This church apparently welcomes visitors with large notices inviting them to contribute to the restoration fund.

I’ve heard of other churches with members who are resisting as vocally as they can the changes their Ministers and some lay leaders want to make. One change fiercely resisted was replacing The Methodist Hymn Book (published in 1954) with Hymns & Psalms, a book that has now actually been superseded by Singing the Faith.  Another change strongly resisted was removing old, narrow and very uncomfortable old wooden pews and replacing them with comfortable seating.  On a different tack members of one church strongly resisted their Minister’s intention to replace the traditional carol service with something a little more focussed on evangelism, something intended to bring the true message of the gospel to those who might only attend church once a year for a carol service!  The mind boggles, it really does.  I’m really only scratching the surface with these examples.

These dinosaurs seem to be looking back to an imagined ‘golden age’ of church; probably located somewhere in the 1950s, when moral standards were ‘better’, when there was a huge Sunday School full of impeccably behaved children, when ‘proper hymns’ were sung….. and so on.  They imagine that if they can only take the church back in time to that era then all will be well; our churches will be full and they will be happy!

They will not be happy.  If we turn back the clock in churches, if we cling to the past, using out-dated hymns full of Shakespearean English with old fashioned tunes and worshipping in a way that does not connect with our 21^st century culture instead of looking to the present and the future then we will not have full churches; we will have empty churches or churches being used for purposes other than Christian worship.  The loudest voices raised in horror at the closure of the churches will be the very dinosaurs whose obstinacy and refusal to change in line with the movement of the Holy Spirit brought about their demise.

Forward looking Spirit filled church leaders must be willing to stand up to these dinosaurs, albeit in a sensitive and loving Christian way.  We must be loving, but we must also be firm.  Church cannot be what the dinosaurs want it to be; a cost Sunday club where familiar songs are sung and comforting sermons with no challenge are preached.  Churches need to be dynamic expressions of the Kingdom of God where the gospel is preached, where worship is genuine and comes from the heart and leads people towards God, where people are taught and enabled to be committed disciples of Jesus Christ: radical communities of Spirit filled followers of Jesus with a burning passion to spread the good news, radical counter-cultural communities of faith and love at the very heart of their communities always looking to follow the movement of the Holy Spirit of God where ever he leads them.

Making A Covenant with God

Yesterday, and over the next few weeks, many British Methodist Church will have held or be holding their annual Covenant Service.

I used to hate this service.  When I was young I thought it went on for far too long and it didn’t really mean much to me, possibly because by the time we got to the actual Covenant promise I was half asleep.

I now love the Covenant service and see it as one of the jewels in the Methodist crown; something I am told other denominations are quite envious of.

Covenants are part of the history of God’s dealings with his people:

1.     1.  There was a Covenant between God and Noah in Genesis 9, “I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”  The rainbow is a reminder of the first Covenant

  There was a covenant between God and the people of Israel in Exodus 24.  “Then Moses took the Book of the Covenant and read it to the people.  They responded, ‘We will do everything the Lord has said; we will obey.”  Unfortunately the Israelites broke their Covenant with God time and time again.

God spoke to Jeremiah of a new Covenant.  Through Jeremiah God said, “I will make a new Covenant.  I will put my law into their minds and write in on their hearts.”  This Covenant was made by Jesus himself at the Last Supper when he said, “This is my blood of the new covenant which is poured out for many.”

The Covenant promise can be scary to some people.  I have talked to some Methodists who go to the Covenant Service but feel they cannot make the promise – it is too binding, giving too much, they are not sure that they can keep it.

It can be dangerous promise to make – it led to my being called to Methodist ministry, totally disrupting my life, changing everything.

The Covenant promise is a promise to be disciples of Jesus.  It is a promise to give everything we have and everything we are to him.  It is a promise to put Jesus first, to make him the Lord of our lives.

The words of the promise are:
‘I am no longer my own but yours.
Put me to what you will,
rank me with whom you will;
put me to doing,
put me to suffering;
let me be employed for you,
or laid aside for you,
exalted for you,
or brought low for you;
let me be full,
let me be empty,
let me have all things,
let me have nothing:
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things
to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
you are mine and I am yours.'

Over twenty years ago David Watson, an Anglican evangelist and Vicar wrote:
“Christians in the West have largely neglected what it means to be a disciple of Christ.  The vast majority of Western Christians are church members, pew fillers, hymn singers, sermon tasters, Bible readers, even born again believers or spirit filled charismatics – but not true disciples of Jesus.  If we were willing to learn the meaning of real discipleship and actually to become disciples, the church in the West would be transformed, and the resultant impact on society would be staggering.

This is no idle claim.  It happened in the first century when a tiny handful of timid disciples began, in the power of the Spirit, the greatest spiritual revolution the world has ever known.”

Martyn Atkins, the General Secretary of the Methodist Church, has written:
“Methodism is, at its roots, a discipleship movement and a disciple-making movement.  Yearning and actively seeking to become better disciples of Jesus Christ and offering him to others, lies at the heart of being Methodist Christians.  It resulted in the Methodist movement coming into being and my own view is that the future of Methodism is closely connected to the degree to which it is committed today to being increasingly shaped as a contemporary discipleship/disciple-making movement.”

To make the Covenant promise is to promise to be a faithful disciple of Jesus.  It is a promise I make with joy, because nothing can be better than following Jesus, our Saviour and Lord.