Schindler's List

I love to watch a good movie. The difficult thing I find is finding one amongst all the rubbish that is out there. Now, one of my all time favourite movies for a whole host of reasons is Schindler’s List. It’s not an easy movies to watch and can be heart wrenching one minute and soul destroying the next, but I can help but love it. It’s a film that tells of and shows man’s inhumanity to man and yet at it’s heart is one man’s fight against the evil powers that be. I find parts of the film really difficult to watch but there is one part that gets me every time. The film is near it’s end and they have all been told that the war is now over. The Jews are starting to return to their homes and Oscar Schindler is about to leave one of his factories. Now that it is all over he is suddenly struck by what has been going on and it hits him that he could have done more, he could have saved more lives. He looks at his watch and says that this would have bought a few more lives. He falls to his knees overwhelmed by the fact that he could have done more. He doesn’t well up with pride that he saved so many he is overwhelmed with grief that, perhaps, he could have done more. The pain he is feeling at that point is almost overbearing.

You can almost guess what I’m going to go on to say!! We need to live our lives so that we don’t look back with regret. It is almost an impossible task I believe, because like Oscar Schindler there is always more that can be done. However, let that not be an excuse for us. There is always more to be done, but there is usually more that we could do. I’m not saying that we should run ourselves raged and die at 31 of a stress induced heart attack, but I am saying that there is a world dying out there. Both physically and spiritually the work is there to be done. Will we like Schindler put ourselves out to help save many and then still regret that we could have done more? Or will we sit back and wait for others to do it? Will we see the task as too big and therefore give up before we’ve even started or will we be faithful to the work God has called us to do in our little area of life and slowly make a difference?

I love the story of the boy and the starfish…

One day, an old man was walking along the beach in the early morning and noticed that the storm of last night had washed thousands of starfish up on the shore. Up ahead in the distance he spotted a boy who appeared to be gathering up the starfish, and one by one tossing them back into the ocean.
He approached the boy and asked him why he spent so much energy doing what seemed to be a waste of time.
The boy replied, "If these starfish are left out here like this they will bake in the sun, and by this afternoon they will all be dead."
The old man gazed out as far as he could see and responded, "But, there must be hundreds of miles of beach and thousands of starfish. You can't possibly rescue all of them. What difference is throwing a few back going to make anyway?"
The boy then held up the starfish he had in his hand and replied, "It's sure going to make a huge difference to this one!"

There is so much good that each of us can do if we focus on individuals and the small things we can do rather than get swamped by the bigger picture. I am the worst of culprits. I’m with St Paul as I see the good I should do but I don’t do it. Let’s encourage each other to do our bit, however small, to change this world for the better.

Truth and Relevance

Christianity must be relevant. I hear this so often nowadays. Our church won’t grow until it becomes relevant. People in our community won’t join us until we show them that Christianity is relevant to their lives. Do you hear this? Do you agree with it?

I agree with it. I believe that we need show that the church is relevant. We need to provide people with ways into the church ways to discover it‘s relevance. These things might be parenting courses or toddler groups or things of this sort. However, we need to be careful. Are we, in trying to make the church relevant, providing people with their pudding without providing them with their main course? In today’s society people believe that truth is found in the fact that something works for them, makes them feel good. If something makes you feel good it must be right. You go to yoga and you feel more relaxed and therefore you agree that the systems behind it holds some truth for you. You go to your doctor with a headache and he gives you some medicine and it works you therefore have trust in that medicine and in the doctor (even if all he gave you was a tic-tac). What if the church is doing this? We are providing things for people that make everything feel ok. We’ve looked after their children, we’ve taught them to be better parents and how to drug-proof their kids. We’ve made them feel relaxed and comfortable. They feel good about themselves, they feel there is truth for them in what they’ve been experiencing. The question is though, what have they been experiencing? It isn’t Christianity. It might be the love of Christians, it might be some life skills initiative, but where is the challenge of the gospel? Where is the connection between what Christians can offer and what they really believe.

The church has something that is relevant. Our job is to show people just how relevant it is to them. At present aren’t we acting like a company who finds a cure for HIV, Cancer and all other known diseases and markets it as a cure for a headache? People buy it thinking that it is relevant to them as they get headaches. It’s only years later that, in a bored moment, they read the little leaflet and find in the small print that it also cures everything else. Yet they’ve only been taking it twice a year to cure a headache. These people may have died because they were only shown a superficial aspect of the drug and therefore not put it’s saving powers to work.

If, as we believe, Christianity is true and the claims of the Bible and Jesus are true then Christianity is relevant. We need to celebrate it’s truth and relevance. Are we not moving towards putting the trimmings of Christianity on display and not showcasing it’s truth, relevance and main draw. We are trying to sell Christianity through offering parenting skills, children’s groups, youth entertainment and so on when Christianity has to offer the complete forgiveness of sins, eternal life, a relationship with our creator, help on earth and a hope for the future, being a part of the body of Christ and so much more. If that is not relevant to people’s lives I don’t know what is.


Footnote: Please don’t get me wrong I believe that such initiatives that reach out into the community such as parenting courses and toddler groups (I run one myself) are brilliant and I’d love to see more of them. However, I do believe that we need to look at the whole picture and see how these initiatives are used to move people from the fringes of faith to a full belief in the saving power of Jesus Christ. We have a huge responsibility to the people on the fringes of our church not to let them stay there.

People Follow People

Last year I read an excellent book by David Murrow called Why Men Hate Going to Church. I would recommend it to anyone, but especially those in church leadership, those who have the ability to change the way we do church. One of the excellent points he makes is that Men follow Men. If there are good male role models within a church then men will be drawn to that. I also think it’s true in general to say that people follow people. If you know someone who’s into football you are more likely to be drawn into watching and maybe eventually liking football.

I want you to think for a moment about your church and your leadership. What are they like? What do they spend their time doing (in work and out of work)? Do they inspire you to follow them?

When I was in my late teens I knew a lot of intelligent people. They went to Oxford and Cambridge and had high academic aspirations. Some of them wanted to gain their degree and then their Doctorate and then return to Oxford or Cambridge to teach. I always thought this was a bit of a shame. It felt to me that you had this section of academia that was stuck in this self perpetuating loop of learning and teaching and learning and teaching… Wonderful minds stuck in a circular movement of self-serving propagation.

Is it though any different within the church? Our leaders, on the whole are there to serve the church, they pastor and they preach and a few of the congregation move into leadership within the church and a very few go on to be pastors themselves. Pastors who preach and pastor and produce leaders and some pastor and so the church goes on. Does this really inspire us to follow?

Now, you’ve had a little think about what your pastor does. If he’s anything like the pastors I know and have known here is a little list of what I can see pastors doing…

1. Preaching
2. Leading Services
3. Leading Meetings
4. Taking Small Groups
5. A bit of Schools work
6. Pastoral Visiting
7. Administration
8. Preparation

Now, each pastor is different and has different priorities and callings, but on the whole can you see pastors that fit that list well? If I look at a pastor through the eyes of this list it’s not very inspiring is it. I don’t look at them and thing WOW!!! I wish I could be more like that!! The list above is a list that serves the church. It is self serving, inward looking, uninspiring.

People follow people!!

What if the list looked a little like this…

1. Feeding the hungry
2. Healing the sick
3. Seeking the lost
4. Visiting the lonely
5. Supporting the addicts
6. Preaching the Good News
7. Teaching Kingdom Values to the community
8. Cleaning the graffiti
9. Preaching the Great Commission
10. Delegating responsibility

What if we encouraged and empowered our pastors to follow this sort of list?

Would you want to follow someone who lived by this list? Let me ask you a question. When was the last time your Pastor brought someone to Christ? When was the last time they went and spent time with the homeless, making them feel special and loved and feeding them?

These are hard questions. They are hard questions for our pastors but they should also be very hard questions for us as people in the pews. What have we required of our pastors? What have we employed them to do? Are we secretly wanting them to serve us or to serve Christ? Are we wanting them to seek and save the lost or build us up?

I have come across people who believe that their pastor is there to serve them, to visit them when they are sick, to guide them etc. I have even heard people say that the church doesn’t care for them as only an elder and two house group members have been to see them when sick and not the main pastor. Have we created pastors who are now simply serving the church. Have we created a group of people who are so far removed from what they should be that we’ve created people even we don’t want to follow let alone people from outside the church? Let us think about who we want to follow and allow, encourage and empower our pastors to be that person.

When did church become so different?

When you look at the western church today what do you see? Well, I don’t know about you but this is what I see both personally and when trying to look at it from a non-church-attendee’s point of view.

1. A building
2. Services on a Sunday
3. House groups - attended by about
10-20percent of attendees
4. The odd prayer meeting
5. Some social action
6. A cluster of peripheral groups
7. Occasional meals together
8. Some youth work

Now this isn’t, of course, the whole picture. Churches differ but the majority would have something of the list above about them. So then I look at the early church, a church started by Jesus and build upon Peter and I see.

1. Devotion to the apostles teaching
2. Devotion to the fellowship
3. Devotion to prayer
4. Devotion to the breaking of bread
5. All believers were together
6. All believers had everything in common
7. Together they met the needs of the fellowship
8. They met together every day
9. They met in public
10. They met in each others homes
11. They ate together
12. They praised God
13. They enjoyed the favour of all the people

And the result… The Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

When you look at the two lists they are poles apart. So it begs the question when did the church change so much? To my mind the 13 points of the early church should be our basis for church today. After all it certainly worked as the Lord added to their number EVERY DAY! When was the last time we had even two consecutive days when the Lord added to our church those who were being saved? (don’t stop and try and work it out - you’ll be there far too long). We can look at the list and find some things that we are doing - I guess praising God would be the obvious one. However, I’d also guess that the first 9 are pretty far from what most churches are doing today. The word devotion would defeat most of our churches in the first four items, Yes, we pray as churches but could we honestly say that as a church we are devoted to prayer? In reality most of us pay prayer a bit of lip service and wonder why we don’t get answers.

When you look at that second list, don’t you just pray that we could capture something of that list in our lives and in our churches? Just think for a minute what it would feel like to be a part of such a church? Just think what it would feel like and how encouraging it would be to have people added to your church everyday not just once in a blue moon? To be apart of something that is vibrant and moving and united and encompassing and driven must be a wonderful feeling. The church has changed from a movement to a stop. When did the idea that a church had to be housed in a grand building separating it from the rest of the community come from?

When I look through the early church list something in my spirit yearns to get back to that. Do you feel the same? I’ve thought of a few ways that I might start - though most of the ideas I have hinge on finding likeminded people (it’s pretty hard doing church on my own). I’d love to find a couple or couples (or families) where we could meet each week and have a meal together and talk about Godly stuff. Where we can build such a depth of relationship that prayer, sharing, devotion to one another, praising God and learning from each other becomes natural, becomes the norm. I believe that God would use such a gathering powerfully. I’d challenge you to have a think about how you could implement an early church ideal in your life. I’d love to hear your ideas and any progress you make.

Missionaries Overseas

Now don’t get me wrong I think it is good and right to send people abroad to spread the Gospel amongst different people groups around the world. After all we are commanded to go into all the world... However, what I find myself constantly questioning is how we send them and how we receive them back.

Now in writing this I know I’m lumping all missionaries from every church and mission agency into one basket and for that I apologise. These observations come from a limited experience but also from many conversations with those who have had much more experience that I. I also want to state that this in no way based on missionaries that I know or trying to call into question the call that missionaries have to go overseas.

The sending out of missionaries perplexes me. You take one person and dump them in the middle of a strange country and expect them to model the Christian life of community, fellowship and relationship. To me it makes no sense. Surely the ideal would be to send out teams and I know some mission organisations do. Yet still we send out these individuals . Even Paul took along companions. I would have thought it obvious that a team of missionaries would have far great an impact that a series of individuals, but perhaps that’s just me!!
So, let’s have a look at the people we send. My question here is if we are sending people to another country to share the Gospel shouldn’t these people be the very best we have to offer? Shouldn’t they have a wealth of experience, the best possible training and most complete support package that we can offer? After all if we were a business trying to sell a new service to another country we would send our best salesman or even the MD would go himself. However, what I’ve noticed is that churches send people as missionaries that are ill equipped, inexperienced and under supported. Time and time again I hear of people being sent abroad as evangelists and church planters. When I hear of church planters being sent I always ask the question of how many churches have they planted here. The answer always comes back as, you’ve guessed it, none. We’re sending out people to foreign climes to cut their teeth and make their mistakes and play with people’s lives. They then return to plant churches in this country? Well, not that I’ve ever heard of! Doesn’t this seem a bit topsy-turvy? I have also seen missionaries sent abroad where the sending church doesn’t believe in them enough to employ them themselves in the home church context. In fact when many return with all the experience of being a missionary they return to the pew rather than the pulpit. So, are these churches missing an opportunity in using these returning missionaries? I believe we have so much to learn from those who have been out on the mission field. So much is learnt there, experienced and encountered that it seems a waste not to use that resource within the home church. Now, of course many missionaries return and are well used in the local church or continue the good work they were doing overseas back in their home country but I think it is something that each sender needs to consider. It’s exciting to send people overseas to spread the Gospel but we need to bear in mind the very practical aspects of their return as well. This may include such things are culture readjustment, housing, employment, pensions and as mentioned putting that wealth of experience to good use.