A Pause in Blogging

Okay, so I've not been blogging. Here's why. In a few days, I go off for a five month sabbatical - a rest from my role as senior leader at Community Church Huddersfield. I have been in that role for the last fifteen years. I recognise that I need rest and refreshing, and that God needs to do some restorative work in me. I had realised that this would mean a break from blogging for some of that time at least - this season needs to be far more about what God wants to say to me rather than what I want to say to others! So what happened is that once I knew that I was going off on this sabbatical, I kind of lost the impetus to blog; my mind has been far more on the spiritual and practical preparations for this crucial step. So now I just need to accept that the blogging has already stopped. And I won't be blogging for at least the next two months. But I hope that my readers will come back and take a look in early June - I may well be back to the blog by then, with hopefully some richer stuff as a result of what God will be doing in me. In the meantime, I'd appreciate your prayers for myself and for the church. This is going to be a really significant time for us. 

Also, I'd recommend in the meantime that you follow Mark Lawrence writing about servant leadership (a vitally important issue for the church right now) - the first couple of posts indicate it's going to be an excellent series. 

Cross and Kingdom - Glory In Weakness

It's been far too long since I last blogged. Life has been happening! While attending to life, still in the background of my thinking has been the cross and the kingdom. In my preaching, I have been looking at God 's glory in us - specifically about how we get the glory that is on the inside of us on to the outside. I don't just want to tell people that Christ is in me; I want them to see him in me.

With thoughts on cross and kingdom still in the background, I think when I was preaching last Sunday I stumbled into something that lies at the heart of this issue of getting the glory out! The message is here if you are interested. But the key to it is from 2 Corinthians 4, and especially v.7 - 'we have this treasure (of God's glory within) in fragile jars of clay.' Many times we feel like jars of clay - and chipped and cracked ones at that; maybe even broken in pieces. But the sense of weakness and inadequacy that we think disqualifies us may actually be the very thing that qualifies us - for grace! God is in the business of taking burnt and discarded stones and building a temple fit for his glory with them. He chooses the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He uses jars of clay to be carriers of his glory! And actually, somehow 'his power is made perfect in our weakness' (2 Cor.12:9), at least in part because it shows that the power is not from ourselves but from him (2 Cor.4:7)

As you read on in 2 Cor.4, you realise that Paul is talking about the cross and resurrection principle that is at work in his life, and that is a key to getting the glory out for all of us (I may blog more on this). And so again we see why we must keep the cross as the centre of our vision of the Kingdom. A man betrayed, beaten, mocked and crucified seems a pitiful expression of such weakness - and yet it was the means of God demonstrating his power, winning the ultimate victory and setting in motion the restoration of everything in heaven and earth. But there is not just glory beyond the 'shame' of the cross; there is actually glory in 'weakness' of the cross, because there we see the extent of the love of God put on display and there is nothing more powerful than his love. 

Kingdom, Cross and the Power of Weakness

The Kingdom theology that I grew up with, and the culture it helped to produce, put a great emphasis on faith and power, on 'taking authority' and 'reigning in life', on overcoming, being more than conquerors, on the life of victory and the triumphal advance of the kingdom. I have benefited from this 'faith message' and it was certainly a great antidote to some of the spineless and anemic forms of Christianity that I had come into contact with before then. But I have come to feel that it also sometimes missed something - and it relates to this point about putting the Cross at the centre of our understanding of the Kingdom.

I consider Isaiah 53 to be one of the most beautiful and powerful portrayals of the incarnation and cross in all of Scripture. It speaks of Jesus as the suffering servant, who grew up before God 'like a tender shoot', who had no 'form of majesty or beauty' to attract us, who was 'despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief', and who ultimately was 'led like a Lamb to the slaughter.' Of course this picture of Christ takes its place among the kaleidoscope of prophetic images of him in Scripture, which can only be held together by the Spirit in us, who causes us to see the different aspects of Christ as we need to in the various stages and seasons of our journeys. But in my experience, the bright and colourful lights of Christ as risen Lord, mighty Warrior and conquering King sometimes blinded us to these darker but still beautiful shades of Jesus as suffering servant and crucified King. And to the message it sends us about how God uses the apparently weak, despised and broken to win his greatest victories and achieve his ultimate purpose. 

In such a Christ I so gratefully find a God who does not break the bruised reed, or snuff out the smoldering wick (Is.42:3), who takes the charred and rejected stones and make a glorious temple out of them (Neh.4:2). This is the God of who David said because David knew: 'a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise' (Ps.51:17). It is because of such a God who demonstrated his greatest power in such weakness, that the weak are able to say I am strong (Joel 3:10; 2 Cor.12:10)! This is the glory of a cross-centred kingdom. 

Kingdom, Cross and World Transformation

I will come on to say something about the work of the cross in relation to the personal life, which is where it must begin. But I have been reflecting on it in relation to the hope of world transformation which has been central to the kingdom message I have believed and preached for many years.

In the dissertation that I completed for my MA last month, I examined why the restoration movement did not have a greater impact on society, as its theology - of kingdom here and now (see here) - might have indicated it could have. There were various reasons that I considered but central to my conclusion was that there was a lack of an understanding of the centrality of the Cross in our theology of the Kingdom; I now think that this is central to any engagement with society and attempt at social transformation. I quote the key paragraph below (commenting on what I saw as a tendency to triumphalism and a 'proclaiming the answers' model to social engagement):

It is possible and likely that this model arose as a result of the excitement of moving from an eschatology of defeat and escape to a positive one of victory and world transformation; from one of retreat to one of ruling. It was a positive and welcome kingdom theology but the results of my reading, research and reflection have caused me to conclude that its adherents didn’t always fully grasp or expound the countercultural and crucicentric nature of the kingdom of God. A book that was an early influence on some in this movement was The Community of the King (Snyder, 1977) which argued that the church did not exist for itself but as the means of the transformation of society – a kingdom community. But Snyder specifically warned in this proposition for a theology of social transformation that the cross must be kept at the centre of the kingdom vision:

…the present expression of the Kingdom demands crucifixion ethics not triumphal ethics. The Church today must not live as if the Kingdom were already fully established: it is called to live the paradox of the King who ended up on a cross. (Snyder, 1977, p.30)

My contention would be that a failure to realise this paradox in its call to social engagement ultimately hindered that engagement. The principle of selfless service and sacrifice expressed in the cross is the essence of the unique and countercultural nature of God’s kingdom. It was not that such a truth was never expressed (see Mansell, D, Jan-Feb 1992, pp.24-28; and Wright, 1986), but it was not sufficiently emphasised. A crucicentric perspective on the kingdom enables an engagement which puts the emphasis much more on serving than ruling, on transformation through identification with a fallen and suffering world rather than simply through proclamation to that world. This creates a basis for an approach to public dialogue and the finding of common solutions for the common good that is much more conducive to public theology. 

Cross and Kingdom: A better way and a better world

Some of you may have noticed that a couple of months ago, I added a tagline to the title of this blog: 'looking for a better way and a better world'. It is meant to reflect what I want the main focus of this blog to be, and what I think is absolutely central to the message of the gospel. The gospel is not just about getting our sins forgiven and a reservation for heaven. It is about God restoring this world to how he originally intended it to be by bringing it all under the good rule of his Son, Jesus. In other words, it is the gospel of the kingdom (Matt.24:14). This is the better world that God is re-creating, that will come in its fullness when Jesus returns to make all things new, but that has already broken in on our world through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. As citizens of this heavenly kingdom, born from above, we cannot be satisfied with this present world as it is, with its ways and wisdom, it culture and power structures. We are looking and longing for the continual and ultimate coming of God's better world, his kingdom.

Now I have believed this for many years (though God is continually filling out my understanding of it). But there was something that I did not really grasp until relatively recently. It is that this kingdom is totally, radically, profoundly different from the kingdoms of this world. It is completely counter-cultural. And this is because at its heart is a totally different way of life. It is a way of life characterised by serving others, by loving enemies, forgiving those who hurt us, laying our lives down for others, giving up the claim for our rights or our comforts, identifying with 'the least of these', winning not through might but through meekness, overcoming through radical love. It is the way of selfless, serving, sacrificial love. It is the way of the cross. So to look for the kingdom of God, the better world, is to look for a way of living that is like this. It is to look for the better way of the Cross.

What I want the next few posts, and really the whole blog, to be about is exploring what this Cross-centred Kingdom means and what it looks like in our everyday life, in the church community and in our engagement with the world.

A great comment on hierarchy:

I know I promised that I would be posting on Kingdom and Cross, and I will. But I first just wanted to post a comment by my friend and fellow-leader, Trevor Shotter. This was a comment he made in a conversation prompted by my last post against hierarchy here. He put is so well, I wanted to make sure that my readers didn't miss it. He puts is so well, I wish I had written it.So here it is:

It strikes me that in a hierarchy someone has leadership as a result of structure; they may have obtained that position by gifting and anointing but the structure then ‘solidifies’ that arrangement. In this model I defer to you because you are positioned higher than me in the structure. It speaks of something rigid, static, set in concrete.

In the dance you have the honour of leading, again, because you are gifted and anointed to do so. But there is movement; we move together. I contribute to the dance but yield to your leadership not because I must but because I know that when you lead the dance is beautiful and purposeful. Nothing is rigid, quite the opposite, it is dynamic.

The dance is not a variation of hierarchy even though someone leads; the nature of the relationship between those who lead and those who are led is fundamentally different.

Isn’t it in our human nature to want to schematise? A hierarchical system is easy to understand, I can see the diagram, I can see where I am and I can see where everyone else is; I know my place. In a dance, however, there is fluidity and changing positions; I don’t necessarily know or understand what everyone else in the dance is doing but as we all move to the same ‘Music’ the overall effect is amazing.

Really well put!

I promise I will post on Kingdom and Cross tomorrow.

The Cross and the Kingdom

Just finishing reading one of Tom Wright's latest books, 'How God Became King: Getting to the heart of the gospels' (I recommend it but be warned that even the books he aims at a more popular audience are still heavy-weight; and I was disappointed that he didn't explore more fully the implications of his thesis - which is that the gospels are not just about us getting our sins forgiven, being justified and getting to heaven but are about how the God revealed in the story of Israel, which now culminates in the story of Jesus, is the king of heaven and earth, about the universal significance of that fact, and about the surprising and unexpected nature of this reign or kingdom - if you've got a spare hour, he lectures on the subject of the book at Fuller Theological Seminary here). 

It is one of a number of things I've read recently on how the Cross  must be kept at the centre of our understanding of the Kingdom. In fact, as I indicated in an earlier post here, the first one to really get me thinking about this was the first few chapters of Greg Boyd's The Myth of a Christian Nation, which just blew me away (and it was this which strongly affected my changing views about hierarchy and authority, which I have blogged a lot on). And in fact, I guess this is what I want this whole blog to be about - a different kingdom which is so different from the kingdoms of this world because of the cross; it is the reign of the crucified king, the kingdom of the Lamb who was slain. It is this truth and this reality which just beats at my heart continually now. It is challenging me at the core, and, quite honestly, changing my views on hierarchy is just a little tip of the iceberg in terms of its potential impact. It is challenging me so much on a personal level about how I live and love (or fail to, far too often), about what church is and how we live in community, and how we engage with the world. So my next few posts will aim to explore more of this amazing truth of the Cross-centred Kingdom. Any insights my readers can offer will be greatly appreciated.

Next post: a better way and a better world.