Over a year ago I received a questionnaire designed to be part of a feasibility study for a new Christian high school. The school would be private; the money would come from a conglomeration of Christian parents and donors.
An article by a North American having visited England made several suggestions about how British evangelicalism could be helped. One of them was to increase the amount of Christian schooling.
What I’m going to say is going to be offensive to those like the chap who wrote the above-mentioned article, and to Christian parents who’ve made financial sacrifices to be able to send their children to a Christian high school, year after year, but here’s my hypothesis:
Christian schooling doesn’t (often) square up with the gospel.
Perhaps the best way to start my diatribe is to give some BAD reasons to send your child to a Christian school:
1. Middle-class Maximillian needs to be protected from evil badly-behaved heathen.
2. Maximillian needs to be protected from evil secular ways of thinking and learn about Christian values.
3. Christians need to build up an impressive “elite” who can (metaphorically) beat up theological and philosophical opponents with a (primarily intellectual) baseball bat.
4. Christians need to mainly live in an exclusive social network with as little contact with the world as possible: Christian education, Christian workplace, Christian soft rock, and Christian cornflakes until the rapture.
I’m not saying every Christian schooling fan has all of this in mind, but I can’t discern any other reasons. Sure, if your little kid is getting beaten up at school (1) then you’d do everything to try and protect him, perhaps even change schools. On the other hand, how far do you go? The world is full of “enemies” and “masters” (to talk in New Testament terms) who we can’t always avoid, and who we must learn to love, respect, pray for, forgive.
That secular thinking sets itself up as an authority over and against God (2) is quite accurate. However, to think that children need to be fundamentally protected from it is wrong-headed and creates more problems than it solves. A sort of “thought police” attitude to the humanities creates Christians who can function well in a closed social network but end up either aggressive towards or unable to converse with people of other opinions. Christian values are great, but children will learn far more from the way their parents love, forgive and ask for forgiveness, than from the way their teachers rip secular thought apart (3). “Not many of you were wise…”.
Thoughts about gospel-flavoured Christian Education:
1. By all means open Christian schools. Open them in the poorest, most socially disadvantaged areas to bless people who have absolutely no interest in coming to my middle-class easy-listening church.
2. Organise a cost-free homework club for children whose parents are: either not interested in or can only financially dream of helping their kids / sending them to homework tutors. Get some college students involved.
3. Read about how God used Christians to improve education in history (G. Müller; A.H. Francke; J.H. Wichern) and how they never set out to “protect little Christian Jonnysocks” but to bless and convert the poorest and roughest children.
4. Think about God our Saviour, who seemed to be much more interested in people who “did not seek” and were lost and abandoned than in making sure the 99 sheep had had their wool coats properly cut, washed and blow-dried.
5. Think about whether gospel convictions become more rooted in:
a) a person who has studied the principle “love your neighbour” in a Christian setting or
b) a person who has learned to love the most aggressive, abusive people our society knows.
If I’m wrong then we’ve all been taught to think things through more clearly, but at the moment I'm struggling to see reasons why we should have private Christian schools. What do you think?
Dear Lord, save us from Christian Education
Homosexuality and obscurity?
There are few churches in the western world where issues of human sexuality and what Christians believe about the unique rightness of sexual expression within heterosexual, monogamous marriage are not difficult. In many churches that is simply because people find this issues very personal and hence very emotive.
But in the Church of England (and most other traditional denominational churches) there is the additional problem that many people and leaders in the church simply do not accept the Bible's teaching on this issue and want Christian ethics and practice in this area to be different from what they have been throughout the histroy of the Church.
Into this maelstrom has stepped the Bishop of my home town, Liverpool, Dr James Jones. Bishop James has generally been considered to be a "traditionalist" in matters of human sexuality (I think this is Anglican shorthand for believing the Bible). He publicly opposed the ordination of Dr Jeffrey John (a gay man with a partner in a celibate relationship but who considers that active homosexual relationships may be compatible with living as a Christian) as Dean of St Alban's.
Bishop James' latest contribution to the debate seems to have taken him quite a long way from this position. I say "seems" because the nature of his comments makes it very difficult to ascertain what he actually thinks about this issue now. Bishop James is a highly intelligent man so I take it that his ambiguity (and downright obscurity) at some points is a deliberate attempt to make it impossible to tell if he has changed his mind or not. I am sure that this is something the Bishop has done to try and encourage openess and debate about this issue in Liverpool and more widely in the Church of England and the nation. But it seems to me that he is profoundly wrong for a number of reasons...
If you want to read the article before following my response you'll find it here.
1 Bishop James talks about the working group he has set up to look at issues around the area of homosexuality and which was tasked to arrive at a "Theology of Friendship". Whilst dialogue with people holding all sorts of view that differ from you if usually a good and valuable thing, he fails to consider that our theology must be arrived at not from conversations with others but from what God has revealed of himself in his word. Others may help us to understand what God has written. But you cannot well develop theology in conversation with people who hold a radically different view of the Bible - because the source of their theology will always be something other than God's word.
2 Bishop James uses the physical intimacy between David and Jonathan to show us that "here are two men with the capacity to love fully, both women and men." It is surely right to realise that our culture is not necessarilty any more (or less!) "biblical" than cultures where men's affections for each other are more demonstrative. But nobody is questionning whether or not we should love others "fully" whatever their sex. Rather the issue is whether homosexual relationships are, in fact, a failure to love fully; which they must be if they go against the commands of a loving God. In any case even if David and Jonathan had been involved in a homosexual relationship (which the Bible gives us no reason to believe) that would not have made it right - any more than David's adulterty with Bathsheeba was right.
3 The Bishop's essay makes reference to the incident in John 8 where Jesus says to the woman caught in adultery "Neither do I condemn you; go and from now on sin no more." he points out that the words of comfort come first and that "the pastor speaks before the prophet." This is, frankly, a very silly reading of the text! The ESV (and some other translations) has all this as one sentence. Jesus spoke the two parts of it more or less instantaneously. So it is ridiculous to use this text to suggest that we should create some sort of gap between listening to the views of others and coming to Bible driven conclusions.
Obviously we should listen politely and respectfully to the views of others on all sorts of issues. But where the Bible has been believed by Christians of all sorts to speak clearly on an issue for 2,000 years we should not put our proclamation of that view on pause simply to listen to the opinions of a group of people who, largely, do not hold to anything like an historic Christian view of the Scriptures.
4 The bishop repents in his article of opposing the ordination of Dr John at St Alban's and of causing pain and distress to Dr John and his partner. I find this totally astonishing. Obviously it is a matter of great sadness that this man and his partner should have been caused distress, as doubtless they were, by the media circus that surrounded his appointment. But it was not Biship James or anyone else who put him in that position. Rather Dr John accepted the post knowing full well that his appointment would disturb millions of Anglicans and other Christians around the world who believe that his position on homosexual practice contradicts the teachings of God and the doctrines of the church he is meant to uphold.
Bishop James says that the controversy over the appointment "narrowed rather than enlarged the space ofr healthy debate within the church.". Does this mean that the best way to achieve debate would be for people who disagreed profpundly with Dr John to have stayed silent? That hardly sounds like a recipe for debate!
Fundamentally it seems that Bishop James is trying to have his cake and eat it. He wants "healthy debate" but not for anybody to feel hurt or disappointed or excluded. But, precisely because this issue is one that, for all of us, goes to the heart of some of our deepest emotions, fear and insecurities, this is simply not possible.
If you are a person in an active homosexual relationship and describing yourself as a follower of Jesus Christ I cannot possible hold and express a view that you should not be in that relationship without causing you pain and distress. I do not wish to do so. But, as a pastor, I am called to explain what God says as clearly as I am able. I long to do it with gentleness and compassion but, rightly understood, these are never at the expense of clarity.
Bishop James is in a very difficult place. But the solution to the sensitivity of the Church of England on this issue is not to create more "space for debate" by promoting to positions of power those who hold a different view of Christian Scripture and Christian Ethics - because that is the cause of the problem!
boring, boring church...?
Is church boring?
Y: a survey of Australian non-churchgoers found that the most common response to why they did not go to church was because it was boring.
N: according to Operation World, 140 million (get that!) more people go to an Evangelical church in 2000 than they did in 1990. Presumably, for them, it is not boring!
Been reflecting on this in order to prepare a talk for this Sunday evening entitled "Enjoying church." What is our problem? I wonder (engage, please), whether it is primarily (I am not saying this is the whole picture) because of what we believe and teach (i.e. questions of faith) rather than primarily questions of what we experience (i.e. questions of emotion). Here are three things that would help us enjoy church more if we believed them, and believed them more.
There is a difference between enjoyment and entertainment
Society today mixes these two up. We think we are enjoying ourselves when we are being entertained. But enjoyment is a deep biblical issue that, though it probably captures some of the emotion of entertainment some of the time, is wider and broader. For example, Paul can write that he is "overcome with joy in all his afflictions" (2 Cor 7.4). Presumably these afflictions are not a barrel of laughs. When we blur the reality of joy in Christ with entertainment, we set ourselves up to make church boring.
Jesus is present in his church
Although Matthew 18.20 is written about church discipline, it nevertheless is built on a certain doctrine of the church, which is that Jesus is present in the church in some indescribable way. So, the picture of the temple is used by Paul to describe the individual where the Spirit dwells (1 Cor 6.19), but also to describe the entirety of the church (1 Cor 3.16, note the plural you). First and foremost this is a question of faith - i.e. whether we believe it or not. This raises an interesting question - whether church is, spiritually, always boring for an unbeliever?
The church family has a special significance
Matthew 18.20 hints at this too - where "two or three come together..." indicates the importance of gathering together. A theme reflected in Acts 2.42-47 and in the language of the church in the New Testament (body, field, building, temple, nation, priesthood etc). When we attend church rather than participate in it, we lessen its glorious nature and the one who is head, Jesus himself.
What do you think? Of course, there are practical reasons too beyond these, and there is much merit in thinking through what these might be (do help me out!). But is part of our problem that in a desire to fix what is perhaps broken (given the mismatch between western attitudes and what is happening worldwide) we go straight to the practical without sorting out the theological?
