Theos Report on the Response of Faith Groups to Grenfell

The latest report from Theos has recently been published:

Amy Plender, After Grenfell: the Faith Groups’ Response (London: Theos, 2018).

Here are some paragraphs from the Theos website:

‘The fire at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017 shocked and horrified the country, the agony and trauma of its victims compounded by the apparent indifference and disorganization that ensued.

‘In the chaos, the role of the diverse faith groups in the community stood out. Churches, mosques, synagogues, and gurdwaras all stepped up to the plate, responding practically, emotionally and spiritually to a moment of pain and confusion...

‘This report explores what the faith communities did, how they managed to do it, and what can be learned from the experience. Based on interviews with representatives of faith communities in the vicinity, as well as representatives of statutory bodies and emergency services, the report charts the faith groups’ response in the immediate hours, days and weeks after the tragedy.’

A pdf of the full report is available here.

Resolved #4: To Do Good to All People

This is a lightly-edited re-run of one of a post from January 2011.

Whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.

Galatians 6:8-10

We like to reap results from our resolutions – some indication that the fitness regime is paying off, that the boxes are being ticked on our ‘to do’ lists, that the bank balance is moving in the right direction. We sometimes forget, however, that ‘sowing’ and ‘reaping’ require hard work. What’s more, there’s a considerable stretch of time between the two activities that demands patience – not easy for those of us who want to see the outcomes of our labour before it’s ready to be reaped.

Here, Paul shows a delicate pastoral balance between the confidence that as we sow to please the Spirit we will also reap ‘at the proper time’. Here is an implicit reminder that this way of living is to characterise our daily lives until that moment, and the encouragement not to lose heart in the process. Crucially, though, the sowing and reaping are not the things that bring us personal benefit, but helping others in need – ‘doing good’.

Interestingly, the exhortation to do good is not contradicted by the emphasis on faith throughout Galatians. In fact, Paul has already made it clear that, as well as being entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel, the apostles encouraged him to remember the poor – the very thing, Paul says, he was ‘eager to do’ (2:10).

All this resonates with what Scripture says elsewhere – that while our primary responsibility is to those in the family of faith, our ‘neighbour’ is anyone in need. As Tim Keller points out in Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010), the doing of mercy to others is indicative of our grasp of the gospel and the scope of its application.

Paul leaves unspecified what ‘good’ he has in mind, which allows us to reflect on its scope – not just the needs around the world, but in the street where we live, the place where we work, the church we attend. And, as Keller reminds us, the mixture of responses required allows for some things to be done by the church as the church, and for other actions to be carried out by individual Christians in their places in society – as we go about our business in the world, seeking to be a living demonstration of the mercy we have been shown by God himself.

Andy Horvath on Matthew 25:31-46

Continuing with the gentle debunking tone of the previous post, Christianity Today carries a short piece from Andy Horvath on ‘What You Probably Don’t Know about “The Least of These”: A more biblically accurate understanding of Jesus’ words in Matthew 25’.

Following R.T France (and many other commentators on Matthew, as it happens), Horvath maintains that ‘the least of these’ in Matthew 25:31-46 are neither Jews nor poor people in general, but Jesus’ messengers. Here, as in Matthew 10:40-42, people’s willingness to receive the message and provide for the disciples is the equivalent of their response to Jesus himself.

Of course, this doesn’t let us off the hook when it comes to issues of social justice:

‘While Scripture doesn’t identify “the least of these” as the poor and needy, in no way does it diminish the biblical mandate to care for the marginalized and underprivileged. Our actions matter. Biblical teaching about justice is comprehensive and does not rest on any single text.’

In addition:

‘While “the least of these” does not refer to the poor and powerless, a proper understanding of the text nevertheless underscores the centrality of compassionate actions to the gospel.’

Jubilee

The Ezra Institute for Contemporary Christianity – ‘for the defense, confirmation and vindication of a biblical cosmology affirming the Lordship of the triune God over all life and thought’ – publishes a magazine, Jubilee, three times a year. The most-recent issue, devoted to social justice, is available from here, with several back issues of the magazine available from here.

Cinnamon Theology Symposium

The Cinnamon Network has kindly posted online a free ebook containing transcripts of the presentations given at the Cinnamon Theology Symposium on 12 February 2015.

The symposium invited three main speakers (David Shosanya, Dan Strange, and Mark Bonnington) to help local churches to grapple with the theological underpinnings of social action.

Summary films by the speakers are here, and the ebook containing their talks is available as a pdf here.

Andrew Williams on Biblical Lament and Political Protest

The latest Cambridge Paper from the Jubilee Centre is available online, this one by Denis Alexander:

Andrew Williams, ‘Biblical Lament and Political Protest’, Cambridge Papers 23, 1 (March 2014).

Here is the summary:

‘This paper considers the pastoral and political role of biblical lament in the Christian life. The theology and practice of lament is often neglected in congregations, despite its prominence in the biblical text. Such neglect deprives churches of a pastoral resource and moreover, as this paper highlights, diminishes the church’s capacity for prophetic critique and political activism in the face of social injustice. This paper argues lament is needed in corporate worship and prayer, not only to give spiritual expression to faith wrestling with pain, but also to re-energise communities of believers to name injustice, recognise political agency and sustain prophetic action.’

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson on (Not) Saving the World

An edited version of this review appeared in the November edition of EG, published by LICC.

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, The World is Not Ours to Save: Finding the Freedom to Do Good (Downers Grove: IVP, 2013), 222pp., ISBN 9780830836574.

‘We don’t have to be the hero of the story, just the steward of our calling’, writes Tyler Wigg-Stevenson in this timely call for a ‘calibration check’ on what it means to have ‘a faithful commitment to doing good’. Although he has a certain kind of activism in sight, there is persuasive wisdom here for all who want to live out their faith in everyday life.

What makes the discussion particularly powerful is that Wigg-Stevenson writes not as a bystander on the Jericho Road, but as someone who gets his hands dirty. As founder of the Two Futures Project, a movement of Christians for the abolition of nuclear weapons, he can’t be easily accused of not caring about the world. Still, he has some straight challenges to the mindset that engages complex issues like poverty and ecology as if the world is ours to save.

So, part one of the book diagnoses the limits of the activist sensibility in which we paint ourselves as saviours (and there are some insightful pages here on our tendency to read ourselves into the heroes of biblical stories, where we are David defeating Goliath rather than one of the nameless bystanders). In addition is the danger of misdiagnosing the problem of our world, underestimating the brokenness of sin and overestimating our ability to fix things. Then there is the risk of depicting a God who is domesticated to serve our causes, along with being blinded to our own complicity in the pain of the human condition.

Part two – ‘a deeper calling’ – provides an alternative. Wigg-Stevenson offers a rich extended meditation on Micah 4:1-5 with its vision of peace with God, seen in worship, discipleship and evangelism, peace among the nations, involving justice, industry and nonaggression, and peace in community, marked by dignity, prosperity and security. God’s kingdom is a world order which God will bring about rather than which we will build. And it is precisely here that our confidence lies: since it is God’s to bring about, we needn’t worry that the welfare of history ultimately rests on our shoulders, and we can rejoice in the foretastes of the kingdom we see ahead of time. We live in its light, orientated towards the promised new world, where it is not our task to win the victory but to show through our lives that the victory has been won.

So, this is not an exhortation to passivity, still less a retreat from culture. The book concludes by proposing that a faithful and sustainable activism can be seen through the lens of calling. Wigg-Stevenson, who served as a study assistant to John Stott and to whom he dedicates the book, provides a moving tribute here to the man whose ‘apprehension of Christ’s supremacy and singularity led him to model a comprehensive embrace of vocation’. As such, Christian activism is most faithful when it is channeled through our primary calling to follow Jesus in whatever we do.

Mission Frontiers 35, 5 (September-October 2013)

The September-October 2013 issue of Mission Frontiers, published by the U.S. Center for World Mission, contains a number of articles around the theme of ‘Water + Gospel = Transformation’.

Setting the scene in the editorial, Rick Wood writes:

‘Today, almost 2,000 children will die from dirty, disease-filled water... The question for us as the Church is whether Jesus wants us to stop such tragedies or is the God of heaven only concerned with getting the message of the gospel to every person, tribe and tongue?’

For Wood, ‘demonstration and proclamation of the gospel go together’.

Individual articles can be accessed from here; the whole issue (9.4 MB) can be downloaded as a pdf here.

Christianity in its Global Context

Researchers at the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, have produced a report – Christianity in its Global Context, 1970–2020: Society, Religion, and Mission – on the changing demographics of Christianity and the activities of Christians over the past 40 years while looking forward to the next ten.

Here is the closing paragraph from the Executive Summary:

‘Christianity in its Global Context, 1970–2020: Society, Religion, and Mission illustrates that fundamental shifts in the demographics of global Christianity and religion are continuing into the twenty-first century. The percentage of Christians from the global South is still increasing, but the personal contact gap between Christians and non-Christians continues to be very wide. Christians are also struggling, along with the entire development community, to address critical social and economic issues. A central problem appears to be uneven resource distribution in a multitude of areas. Christian resources are poorly deployed and not reaching those who could benefit most from them, in terms of both mission and social action. Yet, Christian involvement in spiritual and social transformation has never been greater, and it remains to be seen how effective Christians in both the North and the South will be in carrying out global, integral mission.’

More information is available here, and the full report is available for download as 14.8 MB pdf here.

More from the Centre for Public Christianity (November 2012)

Among other items, the most recent newsletter from the Centre for Public Christianity contains links to video interviews with Tim Costello (CEO of World Vision Australia) on how those of us in the west are more concerned with our own wellbeing than the plight of the vulnerable, and Ryan Messmore, arguing that a place for religion in the public square is a crucial element of a civil society.

9Marks eJournal 9, 4 (July-August 2012) on Mercy Ministry in the Church

The latest issue of the 9Marks eJournal is now available as a pdf here.

In the Editor’s Note, Jonathan Leeman writes:

‘Over the last few years, 9Marks has offered occasional warnings about mission creep in the local church. We believe the local church exists to make disciples and to teach them to do everything that the Lord Jesus commanded. Therefore, the local church, its pastors, its public gatherings, and any joint institutional resources belonging to the body should be dedicated to equipping the membership for works of ministry through teaching the truth in love. Acts of mercy are surely essential for God’s people, but for the institutional church, teaching is essential in a way that organized and structured mercy-ministry programs are not. Teaching is the water that gives life to all Christian activity inside and outside of church building doors.

‘But like every kindergarten teacher knows, sometimes the line is thin between teaching a kid to build a popsicle-stick house and being willing to get glue on your fingers and to build it with her. It just may be that, from time to time, even often, the local institutional church will best fulfill its Matthew-28 and Ephesians-4 mission by getting glue on its fingers. This not only teaches the saints what it means to be a Christian, it also provides a natural vehicle for organizing and facilitating their new-found love to do mercy ministry.

‘Bottom line: the local church, institutionally speaking, is called to teach. That is its job. Lose that, you lose everything. But that institution is made up of human beings who must go and do. And where institutional resources (staff time, budget monies, etc.) are available for something more than teaching, they might be wisely and wonderfully stewarded in helping church members to pursue the good deeds that Jesus commands them to do.

‘For these reasons, 9Marks wants to offer constructive help for how local churches might pursue such organized mercy ministry...’

Duane Litfin on Works and Words

Duane Litfin author of Word Versus Deed: Resetting the Scales to a Biblical Balance (Wheaton: Crossway, 2012), has a piece (here) in Christianity Today devoted to that topic – the balance between ‘the relative roles of words (proclaiming the gospel) and deeds (loving action) in what Christ has called his people to be and do’.

He devotes some space to the saying, wrongly attributed to Francis of Assisi – ‘Preach the gospel at all times. Use words if necessary’ – noting:

‘The belief that we can “preach the gospel” with our actions alone represents muddled thinking. However important our actions may be (and they are very important indeed), and whatever else they may be doing (they serve a range of crucial functions), they are not “preaching the gospel.” The gospel is inherently verbal, and preaching it is inherently verbal behavior. If the gospel is to be communicated at all, it must be put into words.’

Towards the ends of his piece he notes three consequences of conflating the roles of words and deeds: (1) ‘it can lead to an eclipse of our verbal witness’, (2) ‘it can deceive us into thinking the power of the gospel lies within us’, and (3) ‘it can put us out of step with God's own modus operandi in the world’.

Christian History Magazine 101

The latest issue of Christian History Magazine is now out – this one devoted to ‘Healthcare and Hospitals in the Mission of the Church’.

The whole magazine is available as a 32.2 MB pdf here.

Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert on Mission and Social Justice

Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert, What Is the Mission of the Church? Making Sense of Social Justice, Shalom, and the Great Commission (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), 288pp., ISBN 9781433526909.

Although I’m pretty certain I won’t want to say everything the way they say it, I’ve had this new book from Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert on pre-order for several months now, and am really looking forward to looking at it more closely.

A generous excerpt from the book is available here.

And here is the publisher’s description:

‘Social justice and mission are hot topics today: there’s a wonderful resurgence of motivated Christians passionate about spreading the gospel and caring for the needs of others. But in our zeal to get sharing and serving, many are unclear on gospel and mission. Yes, we are called to spend ourselves for the sake of others, but what is the church’s unique priority as it engages the world?

‘DeYoung and Gilbert write to help Christians “articulate and live out their views on the mission of the church in ways that are theologically faithful, exegetically careful, and personally sustainable.” Looking at the Bible’s teaching on evangelism, social justice, and shalom, they explore the what, why, and how of the church’s mission. From defining “mission”, to examining key passages on social justice and their application, to setting our efforts in the context of God’s rule, DeYoung and Gilbert bring a wise, studied perspective to the missional conversation.

‘Readers in all spheres of ministry will grow in their understanding of the mission of the church and gain a renewed sense of urgency for Jesus’ call to preach the Word and make disciples.’

A twelve-minute video available here – featuring the two authors and Ryan Kelly – also provides a flavour of what to expect.

Tom Wright on How the Church of England Can – and Will – Endure

Tom Wright, ‘Keep the Faith’, The Spectator (20 August 2011).

Tom Wright’s recent Spectator article – ostensibly on the Church of England – is now online.

Wright reminds us of William Temple’s line about the church being the only society in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members. He claims that ‘this vision is alive and well, and that the Church of England, though not its only local expression, is in the middle of it’.

‘This is the real “Big Society”. It’s always been there; it hasn’t gone away. Check out the volunteers in the prison, in the hospice, in charity shops. It’s remarkable how many of them are practising Christians. They aren’t volunteering because the government has told them we can’t afford to pay for such work any more. They do it because of Jesus. Often they aren’t very articulate about this. They just find, in their bones, that they need and want to help, especially when things are really dire. But if you trace this awareness to its source, you’ll find, as often as not, that the lines lead back to a parish church or near equivalent, to the regular reading of the Bible, to the life of prayer and sacrament and fellowship. To the regular saying and singing of prayers and hymns that announce, however surprising or shocking it may be to our sceptical world, that God is God, that Jesus is Lord, that the Holy Spirit is alive and well and active in a community near you.’

What follows are some familiar Wrightean themes, all wonderfully put, about Jesus being ‘in charge’ as ‘king of the world’, and about the church – like Jesus – being commissioned ‘to bring healing and hope, to rescue people trapped in their own folly and sin, to straighten out the distorted pictures of reality that every age manages to produce, and to enable people to live by, and in, God’s true reality’.

I try not to be too polemical on this blog, and I deplore the Tom Wright-bashing that goes in some quarters, and I know it’s a short piece and it’s in The Spectator, etc... but I wish he’d been able to say some more about all this ‘Big Society’-type activity on the part of the church flowing out of what lies at the heart of the gospel, the things of ‘first importance’ – Christ died, buried, and risen again, according to the Scriptures. I know the lordship of Christ is at the centre of the gospel – and Wright is up front here in asserting the lordship of Christ – but it is as the crucified and risen Lord that he is ‘in charge’.

Resolved #4: To Do Good to All People

[I contributed today’s ‘Word for the Week’, a weekly email service provided by London Institute for Contemporary Christianity; it’s the fourth of a projected five in a short series drawing on some exhortations from Galatians 5-6 attempting to reframe new year’s resolutions.]

Whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.

Galatians 6:8-10

We like to reap results from our resolutions – some indication that the fitness regime is paying off, that the boxes are being ticked on our ‘to do’ lists, that the bank balance is moving in the right direction. We sometimes forget, however, that ‘sowing’ and ‘reaping’ require hard work. What’s more, there’s a considerable stretch of time between the two activities that demands patience – not easy for those of us who want to see the outcomes of our labour before it’s ready to be reaped.

Here, Paul shows a delicate pastoral balance between the confidence that as we sow to please the Spirit we will also reap ‘at the proper time’, an implicit reminder that this way of living is to characterise our daily lives until that moment, and the encouragement not to lose heart in the process. Crucially, though, the sowing and reaping are not the things that bring us personal benefit, but helping others in need – ‘doing good’.

Interestingly, the exhortation to do good is not contradicted by the emphasis on faith throughout Galatians. In fact, Paul has already made it clear that, as well as being entrusted with the task of preaching the gospel, the apostles encouraged him to remember the poor – the very thing, Paul says, he was ‘eager to do’ (2:10).

All this resonates with what Scripture says elsewhere – that while our primary responsibility are those in the family of faith, our ‘neighbour’ is anyone in need. As Tim Keller points out in Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2010), the doing of mercy to others is indicative of our grasp of the gospel and the scope of its application.

Paul leaves unspecified what ‘good’ he has in mind, which allows us to reflect on its scope – not just the needs around the world, but in the street where we live, the place where we work, the church we attend. And, as Keller reminds us, the mixture of responses required allows for some things to be done by the church as the church, and for other actions to be carried out by Christians in their places in society – as we go about our business in the world, seeking to be a living demonstration of the mercy we have been shown by God himself.