Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger

The title of this post is the title of a book by Ronald Sider. I read an old version of this book as a teenager and it had a profound - if disturbing - effect on me. A friend of mine has recently mentioned that he is currently reading the updated version and this has got me thinking about it again.

If you're hoping for a review of the book then I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed as I can no longer remember anything about the contents. I just remember how it made me feel afterwards and the kinds of thoughts it triggered in my mind - some of which I am still living with. Basically - partly as a consequence of this book, but perhaps not entirely - I now have the following script running in my head, which in the last 20-25 years I have been unable to resolve:

1. I obviously have more than my fair share of "stuff" - certainly on a global scale, although even in UK terms I'm pretty sure I'm above average.
2. There are loads of other people out there in the world who have so little "stuff" that it's a struggle - if not an impossibility sometimes - for them even to survive.
3. I haven't done anything to deserve it. OK, if I'd been a bit more lazy I would probably have less, but most of my success has been down to accidents of birth, ability and opportunity. There are lots of people out there living on the bread line (or below) who work a lot harder than I do!
4. The logical thing for me to do therefore, would be to get rid of a lot of my "stuff", only keep whatever I decide really is my "fair share", and give the rest to those who have nothing. OK, it wouldn't change the world overnight, but it would if we all did it and it has to start somewhere!
5. I don't want to! I could use my marriage as an excuse - and it's not a bad excuse, because I'm pretty sure my wife would have something to say about it if I suddenly decided to give away three quarters (or whatever) of everything we own! - but actually that doesn't really wash because the truth is I was just as unwilling to do this before I ever met my wife.
6. There are obviously lots of implications involved in giving most of my stuff away. Money, to a large extent equals choice. Without money I am far more restricted in terms of what I'm able to do, where I'm able to go and even to some extent, who I'm able to spend my time with. None of these implications are insurmountable though, they just involve very big adjustments. In many respects, these adjustments could turn out to be very positive in terms of forcing me to rethink what is really important about life. 

Basically, there seem to only be 2 possible ways of resolving this dilemma:

1. Convince myself that it's actually perfectly fine for me to keep most of what I "own" and just give away a relatively small amount of that as I do at the moment.

or

2. Actually do it! Work out what I genuinely do think is a "fair" amount to hold onto and give the rest away (but only with my wife's approval of course!). This would of course be a radical and probably very difficult lifestyle adjustment and would be extremely restricting in very many ways. I think I would find the curtailment of liberty the hardest thing to get used to. It would mean sacrificing a great deal of independence and consequently depending a lot more on God and on other people. In theory at least, I believe these to be very good things, but they are also extremely scary and seem to require a massive effort which I can avoid by simply not doing this!

So in the last 20-25 years I have completely failed to plump for either of these options and have consequently had to live with this dilemma!

What do you think about this question? How do you, or have you, managed to resolve it ... ?

Don't Let Your Understanding Get in the Way of Your Understanding

Christianity is for stupid people!

By that of course I mean that Christianity is for everyone, regardless of intellectual capacity.

As a moderately intellectual person myself though, I like to ask lots of questions and try very hard to reason things through. I have a high degree of confidence in my own reasoning skills which can cause me significant difficulties when I'm confronted by something I can't understand. This can make being a Christian quite difficult - because when it comes down to it I don't really understand my own faith! I like to pretend that I do and I can usually talk fairly intelligently about it in a way that sounds quite convincing to other people (or at least to some other people anyway!), but I always have a lot of questions in my own mind - sometimes nearer the surface than others - which I am not able to answer.

I have often noticed that happiness and/or goodness do not seem to correlate - at least not positively - with intellectual capacity. In fact, if a correlation was discovered, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that it runs the other way! The cleverest people I meet and the wisest people I meet are completely different groups. Just occasionally there is some overlap between the two!

I think there are (at least) two different kinds of "understanding". There is a logical/analytical kind of understanding which can be extremely useful, but can also come to some very wrong conclusions, particularly if it strays outside of the narrow range of problems to which it is particularly suited. Then there is wisdom. Wisdom comes from experience, from making good decisions (and sometimes bad ones), and from an instinctive or intuitive grasp of what is good, right and meaningful - from a deep inner sense of what really matters in life.

But how do you get wisdom? The book of Job (in the Old Testament part of the Bible) has this to say:

There is a mine for silver
and a place where gold is refined.
Iron is taken from the earth,
and copper is smelted from ore.
...
But where can wisdom be found?
Where does understanding dwell?
No mortal comprehends its worth;
it cannot be found in the land of the living.
The deep says, “It is not in me”;
the sea says, “It is not with me”.
...
                        - Job chapter 28

And what is wisdom anyway? The book of Proverbs says this:

The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom¹!

                        - Proverbs chapter 4 verse 5

A recursive definition if ever there was one!

Proverbs also says this though:

Does not wisdom call out?
Does not understanding raise her voice?
At the highest point along the way,
where the paths meet, she takes her stand;
beside the gate leading into the city,
at the entrance, she cries aloud:
...
                        - Proverbs chapter 8

So wisdom is both elusive and hard to find (according to Job) and shouting out in public to anyone who will listen (according to Proverbs). Both of these things are true - wisdom is sometimes best expressed through paradox! The logical mind doesn't like paradox and tries to resolve it. The wise heart knows how and when to accept it and hold both parts in tension.

I can't tell you where to find wisdom, but I can tell you that it is accessed primarily, not through the logical/analytical mind, but through the heart. Pascal spoke well when he said:

The heart has its reasons, that reason knows nothing of

Pascal also said:

It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason.

And the quote from Job earlier goes on to say:

The fear² of the Lord — that is wisdom,
and to shun evil is understanding.

Understanding in the sense of "reason" is a good thing and should be encouraged, developed, listened to and taken seriously, but reason will only get you so far. Understanding in the sense of "wisdom" will take you to a deeper level - a level that will show you what reason is for and teach you what to do with it.

Wisdom should be informed by, but not clouded by reason - don't let your "understanding" get in the way of your "understanding"!

Life, Faith and Heuristics

The other morning I was lying in bed, thinking about heuristics. If you think that seems strange - well, I'm sorry but that's just what it's like in my head sometimes!

For those who don't know, a heuristic can be loosely defined as, "a rule of thumb". Most of us use heuristics all the time, usually without realising it.

For example, if you want to catch a ball, there are 2 ways you could go about it. You could take the computational approach, which you might use for example if you wanted to program a robot to do this.You could calculate the speed and trajectory of the ball, perhaps factoring in gravity and wind speed, work out precisely where it was going to land, and then make sure your hand was in the right place. Or, you could take a heuristic approach. This would be something along the lines of, "the ball is getting bigger very quickly - I need to move my hand back a bit", and keep adjusting until it lands.

Heuristics are useful because most of us don't have enough information most of the time to make perfectly calculated decisions (or fast or precise enough brains to do so if we did), so we constantly have to make best guesses based on what we do know. Our ability to make such guesses correctly (or at least optimally) is constantly refined through experience. If it wasn't for heuristics we would all suffer from "analysis paralysis" - we would spend so long trying to work out how to do something, or even what to do, that we would never actually get around to doing anything at all! The trade off though, is that sometimes we get it badly wrong! This is where science comes in.

For thousands of years, people have taken a heuristic approach to all sorts of things and come to all kinds of wrong conclusions. For example, based on the information available to them at the time, people concluded that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe and that the world was flat. Science on the other hand, takes a much more stringent approach, and sometimes comes to conclusions that seem quite alien to our heuristic-oriented brains. For example, through a rigorous process of scientific investigation, we now know that most of what we call "matter" is actually made up of empty space (!) - populated by tiny particles bound together by electromagnetic forces, which cause them to arrange themselves in various formations that appear to us as solid, liquid or gas^*.

For most of human history it seems, most people have believed in gods or in a God, but nowadays it seems, at least in certain corners of Western Civilisation, that this belief might be on the wane. The wave of scientific progress over the last couple of hundred years or so has overturned and/or thrown into question so many of our traditional assumptions and beliefs. It has also given us a much-heightened sense of confidence in our ultimate ability to solve all the fundamental problems and questions of the Universe. Science has taught us to be suspicious of our heuristic interpretations of reality and to distrust anything that cannot be rationally tested and proved. At the same time though, heuristics continue to be crucial to living our daily lives.

If you want to catch that ball for example, you're going to have to use a heuristic approach - you simply don't have sufficient knowledge or brain-processing-power to do otherwise. If you're considering a new job and want the best outcome for yourself and your family - you cannot work out what will happen in the future and will have to make the best guess you can with the information you have. If you ever want to be in a relationship with anyone, you're going to have to decide whether or not you can trust them - but there is no scientific or logical formula for this! Instead, based on the limited information you have, you are just going to have to decide whether or not to take the risk.

Faith is a heuristic approach to life, and it seems clear to me that in the past (and no doubt in the present) we have got some of it wrong. Faith needs to listen to science and to learn from it (although not necessarily from everything that is said by all of its practitioners!), but science also has a few things to learn from faith. Science will never be able to prove that there is no God, and good scientists - even those who are the most staunchly atheist - will usually admit to this when pushed. By the same token though, science will never be able to prove definitively that there is a God, if indeed He is omnipotent and does not wish to be "discovered" or "analysed" in this way.

For all its remarkable achievements, science is just a tool and remains limited in scope and application. There is so much in life and reality that we don't know, will never fully know, and could never fully analyse if we did. Therefore, although science can and does furnish us with valuable data to inform our decisison making process, most of the important things in life - including faith - must continue to be determined by heuristics.

A Different Kind of Church

My wife and I were recently invited to join "Revive" on one of their weekends away.

"Revive" are a Leeds-based group of Christians, who are not really sure whether they're a "church" or a Christian community. Some of them are also involved in another church in Leeds and some even moved away from Leeds years ago, but have kept in touch and still occasionally meet with the rest of the group. So in some ways Revive is more like an extended spiritual family than a "church" in the traditional sense.

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So what is a "church" anyway?

For most people, the word "church" probably conjures up images of old stone buildings - perhaps Catholic, Church of England or similar. If you are a Christian, or have hung around many Christians, you are probably aware that there are actually many different kinds of churches, but for the most part they probably still revolve around some sort of building and a meeting that happens there every Sunday morning, where perhaps there is a Bible reading or sermon and people sing Christian songs together. Nowadays there are some very modern, and much more dynamic, variations on this theme which are specifically intended to appeal to a younger, 21st century audience, but the same basic structure usually still remains.

For some years now, I've felt dissatisfied with this model of church and have searched for a more organic, community-based, relationship-centred way of doing things. That's not to say that relationships or community are missing from the traditional model, it's just that I want to be part of something that is primarily based on community and relationship, rather than on a particular structure or way of doing things.

Several years ago, in pursuit of this quest, I joined a church in Leeds called "Word of Life", which at the time was going through a process they called "deconstruction". Their aims seemed to be similar to mine - they wanted to get away from the standard model of church as an institution, and pursue the idea of church as a spontaneous, organic relational community instead. Unfortunately for me though, deconstruction went a little further than I had anticipated as all formal structures were intentionally dismantled. Meetings became fewer and further between and eventually stopped happening altogether. All the leaders stepped down, and since there was no-one left who was willing to take responsibility for anything, the community as a whole ceased - in any meaningful sense - to exist. Many of the relationships continued and some Word of Life members began to organise smaller gatherings with other groups of Christians. Previously, many Word of Life members had also met in smaller "home groups" during the week. My own home group continued, and still does, though to my knowledge it is the only one now, that still meets.

For the last few years then, I have been unattached to any "church", but still get involved in quite a bit of Christian stuff. I meet regularly with my home group and pray and chat things through with other Christian friends. I occasionally visit our local Anglican church, and have recently enjoyed attending a "School of Theology" course at St. George's. I also belong to the "Left Bank God Group", which tries to promote the Christian message in a non-threatening and accessible way through a local community and arts venue which some of us are involved with. In a way then, not being part of any particular "church" has made me feel much more a part of "church" in the wider sense - i.e. the church of everyone who knows and loves Jesus, whatever denomination or organisation they are in.

Regardless of all this though, I still sometimes miss being part of a close-knit Christian community which is larger than my home group, of like-or-similar-minded people who I can share with, learn from and learn with. This is why I have been so pleased recently to learn - and experience - a bit more about Revive.

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The venue for the weekend was Westwood Christian Centre in Slaithwaite. The main hall has comfortable seating for about 20 people, but probably the first thing you notice about it is the swing! Right in the middle of the room, surrounded by chairs, is a swing consisting of a wooden bar suspended by two ropes from the high ceiling. For me, it kind of summed up the spirit of the weekend - the "serious" business of worshipping God and learning together, but permeated throughout by a sense of fun, as any genuine prolonged encounter with God is and should be!

Revive are a pretty laid-back bunch of people and I immediately felt at home with them. I particularly enjoyed our Saturday morning worship session, which consisted of 20-30 people, including kids, with a couple of people playing guitars and a large assortment of random percussion instruments which were handed out to anyone who felt like joining in. The kids continued to run around and play while the rest of us got on with worshipping God in whatever way we felt comfortable. I love that feeling of being able to really relax and be yourself in the presence of God!

After this, a recent member of Revive who grew up in the Dutch Reformed Church in Canada, shared how this had helped her develop an attitude to Christian discipleship which encompasses the whole of life and creation. After dinner, the leader of the group shared some thoughts about social media, the potential this has for changing the way we do church and the effects - positive and negative - it can have on community and relationships. In the evening we tried a creative/imaginative prayer exercise in small groups, which was surprisingly helpful for me in preparation for my new job. Most of the rest of the weekend was spent just hanging out and included a depressingly wet walk along a canal on Sunday morning, but in good company nevertheless!

I've shared all this just to give a feeling of what a community like this can be like. Revive do other things besides this weekend and are still trying to work out what they are exactly and what they want to do together. I like the way Revive continue to evolve in response to their members' needs and to the role they feel they should be playing in the world around them. They don't seem to be precious about structure or "success" for their own sake. As a relative outsider I feel I'm welcome to take part as much or as little as I want and many other Revive members - like me - have commitments to other Christian groups as well. This does present some logistical challenges but I like the way it mixes things up so that Christians from different groups can overlap, learn from one other, and deepen their sense of belonging to the wider "body of Christ".

I would like to see more communities like this in Leeds - focusing on what they are good at, overlapping and sharing resources with others and learning to be "church" together - instead of separate groups all trying individually to be the "church" and to provide their members and surrounding communities with everything they need, whilst duplicating effort, wasting resources and competing with one another in the process.

New Job!

One criticism/suggestion I've occasionally had about this blog is that I don't write enough about my own life, so here goes!

Yesterday I handed in my notice at BJSS, where I've worked as a Software Developer (i.e. Computer Programmer) for nearly 13 years, and in just under a month I will be starting a new job as an Application Developer (pretty much the same thing) for Christians Against Poverty (CAP).

For a long time I've wanted to use my computing skills to do something I really believe in, and for me this is a perfect opportunity. CAP are a sizeable organisation with growing and changing I.T. needs where it looks as though my skills and experience will come in very useful.

CAP are also a charity, dedicated to helping those who are struggling under the weight of unpayable debt. This means I get to spend all my time during work hours helping to make the world a better place by doing something that makes a real difference to people's lives. For me, this is far more motivating than writing trading, pricing and reporting systems for banks and finance companies, which is a large part of what I do at the moment. I feel extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to do this, and to make a living out of it at the same time!

As you might expect, the salary is a little less than I'm used to, but CAP value their staff very highly (they have won the Sunday Times "Best Small Company to Work for" award twice in the last few years) and pay well for a voluntary sector organisation.

There are also some technical challenges, in that charities tend to use different technologies to businesses, so I have some new skills to learn which may not be as useful to me if I decide to go back to a commercial role in the future. I will enjoy learning them though, and CAP are keen to do what they can to help me keep my other skills up to date.

I share one other passion with CAP, which is a desire to share the central message of the Christian faith as widely as possible! CAP are an overtly Christian organisation, are keen to share this message and do so when appropriate with any clients who want to listen. They are not into forcing this message on anyone, and aim "to ensure that nobody receives less favourable treatment on the grounds of race, nationality, religion, age, gender, marital status, sexual orientation or disability" (https://www.capdebthelp.org/en_GB/clientfaqs), but many clients do find faith in God through their work, and they have some incredible stories of those whose lives have been transformed - emotionally and spiritually, as well through finding freedom from debt.

I have enjoyed my time at BJSS (well, mostly anyway!), and have worked with many great people on some varied and interesting projects. I feel sad to be leaving BJSS and will miss it and the people I've worked with, but am also excited about finally having an opportunity to do something I've wanted to do for so long, as well as grateful to BJSS for providing me with the experience that has made all of this possible.

Reconciled

In my previous post, I discussed how - at least according to the Biblical creation story - human beings have become estranged from their creator God. I argued that, whether or not this story is taken literally, its lessons remain valid.

Having discussed the problem I now want to introduce what I (and Christians everywhere) believe is the solution - specifically, the person, Jesus of Nazareth.

Many different religions have come up with different ways to address what is perceived to be the gulf between us and God, or us and perfection, or us and some kind of happiness/fulfilment, either now or in the life to come. There is much wisdom in many of these traditions, but Christianity - as far as I'm aware - is the only faith to claim that God has done something very specific from his side to solve this problem. According to the Christian faith, God isn't just sitting there waiting for us to work it all out - in fact he's very aware that although we may have caused this problem, it isn't one we are capable of solving all by ourselves.

So God - as Jesus - came and visited His creation. A ridiculous claim? Well, maybe, but one that I and many millions of other believers have become convinced is the truth. By coming here he showed and taught his followers and the rest of us how to live. And just by being who He was - challenging hypocrisy, standing up for justice, upsetting the status quo - he provoked his enemies into showing everyone how not to live as well! His presence brought out the best - and the worst - in human nature, as goodness always does when it refuses to back down. Driven by insecurity and jealous rage, his enemies crucified him as a common criminal, though He was innocent of any crime.

But what kind of God allows His enemies to do something like that? A weak God? An impotent God? Someone who isn't really any kind of God at all? Those enemies though, were not just a select group of angry people. In some ways they actually represented the whole human race. They reacted to Jesus the same way all of us often react to God. We are selfish, suspicious, protective of our own interests. We all like to be in control and react angrily at times when that control is threatened or taken away. All of us are capable of crucifying God in our hearts, and many of us do, every day!

So why not destroy us all? - something God is well able to do! But God wanted to do things a different way. His heart is full of love towards us, in spite of the hostility He often finds, and He wanted reconciliation, not war. So instead, He took the beatings and the mocking and the agonising death and the shame. He let humanity - let all of us - do their worst. Given a free reign, man had to kill God. It was the only logical outcome, right from our first rejection of Him when we ate from that tree (see previous post), but God wasn't going to leave it there!

Because of course you can't kill God - not in the end - and there was no way man was going to win. That wasn't the point though. God didn't want to "win" - and refused to fight on those terms. God just wanted to make it clear that in the end He couldn't lose. And one more much more important thing: God wanted to make it clear that He really does love us, no matter what we do! According to Luke's gospel, Jesus' actually prayed on the cross for His persecutors to be forgiven. Then after He died and rose from the dead - according to the Biblical accounts - He didn't come back with holy vengeance to wreak havoc on his enemies. Instead He slipped quietly away. And left His followers with a message of peace and reconciliation for anyone who would listen - that anyone who trusted in Him, could be forgiven for their sins and the relationship with God could be healed.

You might think it would've all fizzled out after that, but no. 2,000 years later, that message is still going strong and has completely changed the shape of this world. There are also many distorted forms of it around and it has been used and abused by those with vested interests, just as many of the powerful guardians of Jewish religion did in Jesus' day.

Its impact has not been lost though, and the central message of reconciliation is just as powerful now as it was then. Believe in Jesus - trust in Him, trust that He loves you, trust that He wants the best for you, be willing to learn to live life His way - and you too can be forgiven and reconciled with the creator God, the God who loves you and wants to be your father again!

Estranged

I am not a Biblical literalist. Well I am, about certain things. I believe, for example, that the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, was (and is) more than just a person. I believe that he was God come among us and that, after being crucified, he was physically raised from the dead. The early Christians - who lived during and shortly after his lifetime - lived and died for this belief, and I hope that - if it ever came to it - I would be prepared to do the same.

There are other parts of the Bible though, which go much further back, the origins and accuracy of which are much more difficult, if not impossible to trace or to verify. We still have many good reasons to value them and take them seriously though, and in my experience God speaks powerfully through them and they have a great deal still to teach us.

The earliest story in the Bible (that is, the one with the earliest setting), is of course the story of creation. This is not one of the stories I take literally, although I know this is controversial for some of my fellow evangelical Christians. It is a story though, that teaches us some very important things - about ourselves, God and the world around us.

One of the things this story tries to get to grips with is the problem of estrangement. Its author(s) plainly believed that God was real and that He was good - so why did He always seem so distant? And why was there so much evil in the world? The author(s) deal(s) with this by telling a story. In this story, God creates the world - which of course He must have done, somehow - and then makes people to live in it. These people are somehow more than just animals. They are in fact - in some small but very significant ways - like God Himself. God looks after these people - He gives them everything they need - and He trusts them. He gives them responsibility to rule over His world and - crucially - He also lets them choose whether they will be faithful to Him, or ignore Him and go their own way.

In the story, Adam and Eve - our actual, or metaphorical, ancestors - choose to go their own way. They give in to the temptation - presented to them by a serpent - of becoming even more like God than they already are. They eat from the tree of the "knowledge of good and evil" - which is the only thing God has told them they mustn't do. By doing this they are choosing to end their reliance on God's wisdom (and by extension His mercy) and rely on their own judgement instead. Shame and guilt quickly enter the equation as they realise that - without God's help - they are at the mercy of standards they can no longer live up to.

This decision excludes them from God's abundance and provision. They are thrown out of "the garden" - where all their needs have been met, and God has walked and talked with them - into the much harsher world outside, where they are left to their own devices (more or less) in accordance with the choice they have made.

However literally or otherwise we take this story, we can see the reality of it in our own lives and its effects on us and the world around us. Apart from the suffering and evil that are sadly so characteristic of life, God also seems extraordinarily distant, to the extent that many of us doubt, or have even altogether rejected, His existence. The signs of His presence are still all around us though - in the amazing beauty and complexity of nature, wherever and whenever we experience true love, joy or compassion, in our capacity for awe and wonder and in our searching and heartfelt questions about the nature and purpose of reality and of life.

The good news of course is that God hasn't entirely abandoned His creation. The rest of the first part of the Bible (the "Old Testament") is the story of His dealings with a particular group of people, as they struggle to understand Him and live in relationship with Him, and as He prepares a way to heal the rift between Himself and humanity and repair the damage that has been done.

The healing of this rift was the primary purpose of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth - the subject of my first paragraph. How exactly this helps, is the subject of my next post …