Snuggling In

The language of “snowflakes”, as used to describe disoriented and disillusioned young people, has always struck me as unhelpful and unfair. When a generation feels that many of the props or foundations that once provided security and hope have been kicked out from under them it is unsurprising that levels of anxiety are high. The message has been loud and clear that you can be anything you want to be, that the only important thing is to be yourself, that you can self-ID (and that is only and exclusively a positive thing), but the experience is that meaningful work is harder to come by, relationships of depth have been replaced with internet-enabled short term flings, youth-debt levels are massive and family structures and role models have been systematically demolished for many.

We shouldn’t be surprised at backlashes. It is entirely understandable if people search for meaning in rage, activism. Valuing comfort and safety when we are scared, confused, manipulated and feeling the world is stacked against us is only to be expected. If people want insulation from hard reality through safe spaces and trigger warnings is that not relateable? If they seek safety in in-crowds or escapism into fantasy, can we not sympathise?

I suspect the coronavirus is going to make all of us who wouldn’t have thought of ourselves in the snowflake category a lot more sympathetic in the months to come. If we thought that we were more psychologically resilient to global instability, it only takes a few extra props and foundations to be removed from our lives to find that we were only marginally more secure than vulnerable teens. This dawning of reality, however unpleasant, just possibly might have some positive affects:

1. It might make us more sympathetic to the heart cries of people we have previously thought just need to pull themselves together and learn to be a bit more resilient

2. It might make us realise that the mechanisms we use to bolster our sense of safety aren’t as worthy of our trust as we have always imagined them to be. When we base our lives on brittle foundations it only takes a strong enough blow for them to crumble

I am very sympathetic to people who want comfort and safety when the world is falling to pieces. My question is about where that comfort and safety are found, and it isn’t in safe spaces and trigger warnings. Those are just a well-meaning but inadequate attempt to insulate from distress or an exit ramp into living in denial.

The real safe place is that the name of the Lord is a strong tower. The righteous run into it and they are safe (Proverbs 18:10). When God exiled most of his Old Testament people from Jerusalem to Babylon, some of those who managed to remain in Jerusalem started to consider themselves safe. They said “this city is a protective iron pot and we are the meat” - the elites, the ones who endured, secure in our iron-walled city (Ezekiel 11). God responds by saying not only that he will throw them out of it, but that his presence and protection are actually with the exiles, destitute, insecure and far from home. The veneer of safety was not going to save the smug Jerusalem elites. Only the presence of God was going to do that.

How can we experience the name of the Lord being a strong tower that provides safety in these terrible times? Far too early this morning my young son crawled into my bed, pulled my arms around him, murmured “nice and warm” and snuggled his whole length against me as closely as he could. In my half-asleep state I was thinking that is a good picture of what God wants us to do. Jesus told his disciples to remain in him, and thereby in the love of the Father, so that his joy may be in them and their joy may be complete. He says the way to do that is by his word remaining in us. We dig his word as deeply into our lives and hearts as we can, we thereby remain in him and we are thereby safe in him and in his joy. And the joy of the Lord is our strength.

Its easy to think this isn’t a practical answer to all the insecurities we are facing. That a practical answer involves figuring out how we can have a job, continue to get food, not get sick from the virus. Surely those are the important questions, not how to be secure in God? These things are indeed extremely important. But they are not ultimately important. Nor are we actually in control of them. Romans 14:17 says that the Kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. That is, there are greater desires and greater security even than things our bodies need to live. And those things are righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. The first Christians threw away all their desire for comfort even when they were being killed because of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. People are beheaded around the world today rather than renounce Jesus - because of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Our lives adorn the gospel when we are captivated by the Kingdom of God - righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

And it is properly comforting. Not that life is not massively disoriented and disorienting, but because we are ultimately safe. We are comforted in trouble, not just by the absence of it. True comfort is a by-product of secure faith and fixing on the glory of Jesus. Don’t think this is just a platitude. If you’ve read my last couple of blogs you know how much I am feeling disoriented and in need of real, practical, genuine comfort right now. A very wise friend reminded me as I am writing this, that the critical thing for Marcus, as a person and as a leader, is not that I have to be in a good place, super-strong Marcus, a mighty leader for people to hang on to. The vital thing is that we can be weak hangers-on to a super-strong saviour and, maybe, encourage others to do it together.

How can we maintain ourselves in this? I think it is a matter of snuggling in. Of reminding ourselves daily in scripture, prayer and worship of the mighty fortress that is our God, of committing our ways to him, of counting ourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Jesus, of being real and honest with God about our fears, and of learning to trust his grace, mercy and provision. The rubber really hits the road when we ask the question “is God actually going to care for me, really?" Or do I have to sort that out for myself with him as some kind of immaterial sky-fairy for some additional emotional security?” My need - all our need - is for confidence in the Lord that is not surface-deep. His sovereignty over the big and small has not changed. He is completely in control of world-changing viruses and of all the events of my small life, and of the way the large-scale global stuff affects the small-scale personal stuff.

A good start would be to use the virus as a spur to dig deep into one of the gospels. To meet Jesus again there. To turn everything we discover about him into worship. Maybe to take some of the great prayers in the New Testament and pray them. Perhaps memorise them. Basic things like this are what press the reality of God deep into our lives by communicating his reality relentlessly to ourselves and others. Times like this reinforce how critical it is that we do not have a small, powerless God.

Is it OK for a leader to not be OK?

Imagine a toxic waste barrel. You know, the kind you see in cartoons - yellow with a big nuclear symbol on it. Now imagine that barrel is you as a leader. Many in your congregation believe you are a great place to unload their toxicity - their doubts about God, their marriage problems, their unemployment, their gripes about the church. Gradually leaders’ toxicity levels rise. And, of course, they don’t have anyone to offload the toxicity on to (except spouses). Unlike social services or counselling professions, for example, most Christian leaders do not have professional supervision as a matter of course, one main aim of which is to have someone objective who can detox us without it transferring the toxins to them.

I reckon there is good evidence that many Christian leaders take about 15 years for our toxic buckets to get filled to the brim. At which point any new toxicity is likely to produce an overspill or an explosion. Let another criticism arrive in our inbox, let alone several simultaneous marriage crises, plus crises in our own lives and nobody copes. But we have to keep smiling and not admit it because we have carefully constructed an image of being unflappable and infinitely resourceful to the needs of others. It is said that ministers don’t drop out of Christian work because they have forgotten how to preach but because they have forgotten how to be human.

I have to confess to feeling something akin to shell-shock at the speed my life has changed with the pandemic. Within two weeks everything I was planning has been stripped away, as has my routine, to be replaced with providing Daddy School for a demanding and anxious 5 year old who can’t be left to get on with anything on his own for more than 3 minutes. I have to say that my emotions are absolutely reeling. I am experiencing an incomprehension about how I feel (don’t know from one day to the next) and how it is appropriate for me to feel. And how other people expect me as a leader to feel, or what is appropriate to express.

My guess is that I not at all alone, but I am part of that set of Christian ministers who feel we are probably expected to be strong, resilient and spiritually dynamic when in fact we are feeling as weak, vulnerable, isolated and worried as anyone else. Just that we can’t admit that we are feeling it. So here is my confession - I am feeling it.

I wonder if, in the stripping back, the Lord is providing some unique opportunities at this time for Christians - and especially leaders - to pare right back to just praying and getting into the Word of God, without many distractions that normally pile in on us. I wonder if there are chances to learn to lean into God in wholly fresh ways that simply aren’t possible when I think there are other things to lean on - idols like my own psychological togetherness or ability to control my comings and goings. I wonder if there might be opportunities to become a better and more positive encourager in ways that are not possible while I am feeling completely sorted or presenting as omnicompetent? Maybe allowing myself to be vulnerable and human as opposed to platform-preacher-teacher-guy will actually make me more human and take away long-held veneers of Christian leader professionalism. Maybe.

But lurking at the back of the mind is whether people want Christian leaders who are weak and vulnerable. Or do we only want leaders who are strong and able? Do people really want to follow or employ leaders who have a deep walk with the Lord, are able to teach the scriptures and encourage a community in prayer, or ones who promise answers, perpetually unflappable and invulnerable - more Terminator than human? I really hope it is the first, even though it is only now that I am starting to realise how frequently I present as the second.

(Promising the undeliverable is a very real danger for Christian leaders from the point of being interviewed for positions with impossible job descriptions onwards, claiming that we can deliver in order to be appointed; and then being trapped by having presented a fantasy version of ourselves, into either wearing a mask or disappointing everyone).

Secretly, I suspect many leaders don’t want 2 Corinthians 12 to be true - boasting in our weakness and inadequacy, Paul being given a thorn in the flesh to stop him being conceited, and to learn that God’s grace is sufficient.

That’s the thing - God’s grace is sufficient for us. But we are going to have to learn that in whole new ways in which our self is stripped away. But then, maybe, 2 Corinthians 1 might come with greater reality - that we are able to comfort others with the comfort we have received from the Lord. If I am impervious, I scarcely need to receive comfort from him. How then can I comfort others if they think I float serenely through life and pandemics with perfect emotional equilibrium and answers for all their questions and needs? I might be able to train them in skills, but not model how to be a disciple in bad times as well as good, or when I don’t know the answers. If the current situation is teaching me anything it is that the total tonnage of things I don’t know the answer to can sink a battleship.

What do we do with these existential issues? A wise friend said to me earlier today that trying to look at the abnormal through a normal lens doesn’t work. These are extraordinary times when the normal doesn’t work. But extraordinary times end, a new normal emerges and we evaluate and go forward from there. I agree with the idea. Trying to plan how to feel, or even what to do, according to our normal principles when the world is literally changing by the hour is impossible and doomed to failure. We are, in the over-used phrase, in unprecedented times and by next week everything will have changed again.

But in another sense we are not in unprecedented times. The times are simply revealing to us how precarious life is all of the time, but usually masked or slightly ameliorated by our systems. And they are revealing how we should live with life’s precariousness all of the time: leaning in to God, trusting his grace only, not my cleverness or insulating mechanisms, praying. What do we want to model to people? That by being strong and competent like us that they too can survive these times? Or that by owning our weakness and vulnerability we might better learn to cast ourselves on a mighty, trustworthy God?

Another friend likes to say that leaders have to be the chief repenters. Otherwise how is anyone else going to see it being modelled and know how to do repent? The same is surely true about being weak and vulnerable. If we are, but pretend we are not for the sake of a veneer of security, how is anyone meant to be helped to seek God by that?

If this does one thing for me, I pray it will be to make me impress the gospel into my heart as relentlessly and deeply as I possibly can, and to make me pray. It is possible that we come out of this period as scarred and vulnerable, but also having grown in trust, waiting on the Lord and in depth. No longer apparently unflappable but shallow, but rather self-evidently broken yet full of grace, the fruit of the Holy Spirit and the consolation that only comes from knowing Him.

When I said “my foot is slipping,” your love, O Lord, supported me.
When anxiety was great within me, your consolation brought joy to my soul
Psalm 94:18-19

Enforced Stopping

As I write, the coronavirus is rampaging across the world and it seems like society is shutting down. For itinerant Christian workers like me this means that in the last fortnight just about everything in our diaries has been cancelled. Our friends who lead churches are all frantically busy figuring out new ways to pastor their flocks, but those of us with travelling ministries all of a sudden find ourselves looking at many weeks in which we no longer have anything structured to do or to prepare for. As one friend said to me a couple of days ago “a few weeks back I had 6 international trips planned and as much work in my diary as I can handle and I was completely satisfied and fulfilled. Now it has all gone, unexpectedly, in the space of a few short days.”

This week has been disorienting. I had set aside time to prepare addresses for multiple conferences that are no longer going ahead. It is not as if immediately shifting to other kinds of work is something that can be done without thought. Added to which my wife is a key worker teacher of vulnerable children who is trying to figure out what the next weeks will look like in her school and we have a primary school aged son who is now going to need parental care. Even when I decide how to use my new-found time profitably, the situation is so fluid there are no guarantees that my plans will work anyway. Like no other week I can remember, God has used this week to teach me that I can neither rely on my plans nor get my sense of identity and achievement (let alone security) from my Christian ministry activity.

Elijah’s first appearance in 1 Kings 17 is astonishing: “As the LORD, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word.” This is immediately followed not by some amazing revival tour of the Northern Kingdom, returning people to God. But, instead, God directing him into a completely isolated period of three years, first in the Kerith Ravine and then in Zaraphath, the land of death. I think the reason is that, however much he has already learned to stand before God, trusting him alone and leaning into his provision only for his security, he is going to need to have learned it even more acutely for what lies ahead. It is training in trusting. I guess it was both frustrating and anxious, especially when God made the brook dry up.

The lesson for workers like me is that Elijah’s enforced stopping was not spiritually pointless. It was the time for him to learn to stand before God. It will help our spirits greatly to consider our blank diaries with the same lens. This is not useless, wasted space. This is space most of all to pray and cry out to God. To bury ourselves in his word. (When do I normally have the space to luxuriate for an hour a day in Genesis? What a blessing!). Maybe to fast. It may be space in which to bless our neighbours and care for the vulnerable. It might provide time to assist those frantic church leaders. Or perhaps to read, write, produce resources, ring people with a word of encouragement, or wade through all the ministry admin backlog that most of us ignore most of the time. The fact that we aren’t going to be doing the fruitful things we thought we were going to be doing doesn’t mean this will be a fruitless period. Just that God is giving us opportunities to be differently fruitful.

Most of all, my hope for myself is that this time deepens my prayer life and dependence on God. That I treat it like (unexpected, enforced) sabbath. He has not ceased to be the ever-faithful, totally-in-control God. And if coronavirus completely reconfigures my entire life and ministry hereafter I need to accept that as a gift from his good hand. Which means leaning in and trusting him and not my various activities which can vanish like a morning mist.

Finally, how good to remember that the Bible insists we take nothing for granted and hold lightly and provisionally to all our plans aware that God may disrupt us at no notice and entirely at his pleasure:

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.”
James 4:13-15

11 aspects of being made in the image of God

Here are 11 things the early chapters of the Bible say about being made in the image of God. they all depend on God being prior, above and qualitatively different. THE primary distinction is that he is Creator and this is his creation in which we are his creatures. we are by God, for God and in the image of God. This fundamental separation is the ground of all Christian understanding of identity, meaning and morality

• Twofold variety, a community of love. In his image God created a BINITY, reflecting the Trinity, unlike the teeming animals

• Speaking. God speaks, calls, self-discloses. So do they

• Rule as vice-regents under God

• Creativity / separating / taxonomy. God makes things by kinds and calls them and separates them. He invites Adam to name things, thus doing the kind of things God does, as a child with their parent

• Walking with God

• Dependency on God rather than autonomy from him. Being God-centred

• Work. God works, he gives us work

• Innocence

• Honour

• Beauty

• Poetry / speaking exultant words

There are plenty of things that being made in the image of God is not. Theologians like to talk about God’s “incommunicable attributes” - things he does not give to others. We are called to be like him in his holiness but not in his omniscience, for example. Four things that are clear at the start of Genesis that being made in him image does not mean:

• Moral equivalence to God or being moral agents independent of him

• The right to be arbiters of good and evil

• The right to be God. The great twisting of Satan was to take being made in the image of God and use it to tempt to want to grasp godhood

• That we are just like the other creatures

Notes for mentoring someone in Christian work

Anyone who does something a lot internalises the processes that stand behind their actions. They act by instinct and long-learned habit and its important that they do. If I need urgent, life-saving medical help I don’t want the doctor to have to stop to consult the manual

Sometimes, however, there are helpful reasons to stop and consider our habitual practice. Two spring to mind: first to see if, on reflection, there are ways to improve and, second, in order to be able to teach others how to do what we do instinctively

One of the things I get to do a lot of is mentor people in Christian work. I know what to do instinctively through long practice. But the other day, as part of reorganising some documents I thought it would be a good idea to joy a quick proforma down to bring a bit more structure to my mentoring notes and then thought that someone else might find it helpful.
Good note-taking in order to be able to encourage a person further on down the line is simply part of honouring and loving them well

You can find the document here

A few points to bear in mind:

• It is very much “notes to self” rather than a professional proforma. There are probably such things available that will help you do a better job than this but I haven’t looked hard

• This is to help me mentor someone. That is, to help them reflect on their life and practise of ministry

• The exploratory questions are not the be all and end all, just a few categories to help prod a conversation along

• It is not the same as the notes I would make when discipling or coaching someone