I’m called to teach – not to make more people think like me.

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Teachers need to make a distinction between ‘what I want to say’ and ‘what people need to hear’. It’s not always as obvious as we think.

A few weeks ago, I came across a passage on biblegateway’s verse for the day. It said,

“Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” Eph. 4:32

And my immediate response was, “Yea! Why don’t Christian’s get this! It’s just not OK to be unkind to each other on Social Media! Man, Christians suck!” followed by “I should write a blog post about that!” Which is where I started to air-write a passive aggressive, wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing, sneakily unkind rant against Christians for being unkind to other Christians.

Go figure.

So, I didn’t write it.

Phew.

A blog, like this, is a great chance to put out grumpy, self-righteous thoughts, unfiltered and unaccountable to the world. It’s kinda like ‘pretending’ to have a congregation. The biggest difference, of course, is a blog doesn’t have any true form of pastoral responsibility to those it connects with. A blog is simply not a church, period.

At a deeper level though, this exposes an unsettling battle in the heart of every teacher. That’s the battle between teaching what I care about, and teaching for people that I care about.

Put another way, deep down, am I teaching people ‘to think more like me’ rather than ‘be more like Jesus.’

This is not ok.

Preaching is first and foremost a loving act of service to others. Preaching and teaching is designed to be selfless. It takes in the people in the room; their needs, their struggles, their aspirations, their hopes, their dreams, their anxieties, their histories, and what it is they most deeply need – and seeks to feed them, right there, with Gospel-saturated truth.

Preaching is about Jesus and those we serve. It’s never, ever, ever, ever, ever about us. It should certainly be able to shape and change us too, but it’s not designed to be cognitive therapy, or personal ego scratching.

So, why do you want to be a teacher?

If we were to brutally dig down under the layers, and truly look some of the ugly depths of our heart of hearts in the eye – what would be the reason behind the reason behind the reason that we actually want to instruct others?

Putting this yet another way, what is our body language towards ministry? Is it to minister to a broken and desperate world with the healing message of Jesus – or is it to make more people think more like us?

I believe that I am a teacher. I think that’s my calling and as a gifting it comes with bags of responsibility, and trolley loads of insecurities and fears. It certainly runs a daily gauntlet of my own pride and selfish ego. This is why James 3:1 needs to be taken very seriously.

I’d love more people to have a go at teaching, and I want to encourage people not to be afraid of it. But on the flip side, I also want to take great cares that we as vocational, called, Christian teachers respect the weight of what we do, and make ever effort to keep the heaviness of our egos in check as we grow.

I’ve been preaching and teaching for nearly two decades, but it’s only very recently – like in the last couple of years – that I’ve treated the prayer aspect of my preparation at least as seriously as the study or delivery aspect. And this prayer language has changed from ‘God help me plan a good sermon and deliver it well’ to ‘God please, please, somehow, let my heart and ambitions not get in the way of the clear movement of your gospel to a hungry people.’

I’m still very early on my journey with this, but I want to put a strong admonishment out today to those of you who want to teach because you want to make more people think like you.

This is not ok.

For the time being stop teaching. Look that in the eye, and plead with God on your knees for help.

I’m not saying stop teaching forever, because we can’t hold out for perfection – and then there’s the grace that God sometimes uses us most especially in our weaknesses. But if this is the first time you’ve looked that possibility in the eye, then take a step back.

Teaching and preaching are designed by God to help people fall more in love with Jesus. They’re not designed to make more people think more like you.

Sorry.

Pray for me too! We’re proud people. Let’s push through this together and be finally satisfied only when we wake in His likeness (Ps. 17:15).

 

Photo by Nycholas Benaia on Unsplash

Youth Ministry is in my blood…

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I don’t blog on Sundays as a rule, but I’m making a rare exception in the hope someone might read this and pray for me today.

In that vein, this is perhaps more of a personal journal entry, than an instructional blog.

(The very poor cover picture, btw, is from a club I ran in London nearly 15 years ago)

I started volunteering in youth and children’s work just before I turned 14. I was a musician and a group helper in a messy church-style children’s club. I also helped run a Sunday School at my home church, and I ran a house group as part of the leadership team in my youth church.

In the 20 years since, I’ve rarely gone more than a week without being involved in some kind of youth or children’s project. I’ve spent more than half of my life serving on youth teams in a significant capacity.

I was serving church youth groups part-time during Bible College (which I attended straight from 6th Form College), and I started working as a full-time Youth and Children’s Minister from the 20th August 2007.

In some very real ways, youth ministry is all I know. It’s a fundamental part of who I am and it runs deep in my blood.

It’s hard to explain, then, just how fundamentally challenging it has been to the very heart of who I am, that I’ve not been to an in-person youth project in almost six months.

That’s six months without regular in-person connection with the young people I’ve spent years specifically developing projects for.

I’ve still been running online youth projects, connecting with young people one-to-one, and providing resources, but (as we all have come to terms with now), that’s just not the same.

I am a youth minister. That’s who I am. That’s been my whole life. Maybe one day I’ll do something else, but that doesn’t seem to be likely any time soon. This is what God has always called me to do.

Sometimes there’s ghastly gossip, or cut-throat complaints, or self-righteous rants, and it’s like getting a sucker punch to the gut. You want to grab the person by the shoulders and yell, ‘don’t you get that this is my whole life that you’re inexpertly taking a blunt scalpel to!’

It’s not that simple though, of course. Youth work lifers are rarely seen. For most people it’s either an add-on to an already full life or a waiting room for a different venture. For me, and for others like me, however, it’s all we’ve ever done. This has occupied more of my life than any other activity.

Of course, the reality though, is I’m not fundamentally a youth worker. That’s not the truest version of the story. The true story is that I’m a child of the King. I belong to Christ, and that is where my identify fundamentally and essentially lies. I minister (as a verb) but that’s not who I am. I am a Christian, a follower of Jesus, and that’s my single calling. I’m His. This is the real thing behind the thing that I’ve needed to hold onto throughout this last six months. I’m His before I do anything. I’ll need to remember that tonight.

Tonight, will be my first in-person youth meeting in almost six months.

We’ve dotted every proverbial risk-assessment-i and crossed every socially-distanced-t. We are really and raring to go.

I can’t wait to see people again, because ‘youth worker’ is in my blood.

But in true form, I don’t go tonight as a youth worker, I go as a child of the King, to serve and love his people as much as I’m able – in His strength – to do.

So please pray for me tonight – but also pray for the youth work lifers! Pray for us to remain faithful to God, joyful in hope, patient in the storms, and effective in sharing Jesus with young people.

Thanks folks!

Andrew Jackson, in the main foyer of his White House had a big block of cheese…

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If you clicked on this link it can only mean one thing, you are a fan of The West Wing!

Two days ago was #WestWingDay, which marked the anniversary of when the show premiered in 1999 with it’s untitled pilot episode. Opening in a hotel bar, Sam Seaborn and the reporter ‘Billy’ are locked in a tense conversation that includes casual male competitive aggression, the fate of a disgraced employee, and the possibility of a one-night stand. All happening in the context of dim lights, soft elegant music, and nine-hundred dollar suits. The writer Aaron Sorkin had gripped us with intelligent patter trotting through the more nuanced-seeming landscape of American politics. It was masterful.

Six seasons later it had won two shy of one-hundred awards, had hit number 10 on the Nielson ratings with 17.2 million viewers, and it still remains one of the most successful dramas in history. It controversially proved that drama can be both smart and popular.

I refused to watch The West Wing for a few years for one simple reason – all of my current-peers we’re watching it. I was, at the time, attending a very conservative, white-male-and-middle-class ministry training college, and they were all pretty obsessed with it. I was a young, working-class lad from Blackpool, and was trying to navigate that world without completely losing my precarious sense of self. Not watching The West Wing was one of those random ways I decided to accomplish this.

It’s not hard to see why so many conservative Christian vicars-in-waiting saw the characters in The West Wing as role models. Aaron Sorkin’s characters we’re written to wield his signature double-edged sword of righteousness and reason which they used to cut down their opposition both efficiently and skillfully. And they did so well-dressed and well-mannered with poise and dignity. However, they also did so with no small measure of arrogance and vaingloriousness. Because they didn’t always win the day, and because they really were genuine and caring people when it mattered, we were able to pass over these character flaws, and reevaluate them as endearing and even admirable. Eph. 4:26 was subtly rewritten to ‘be smug, but do not sin.’

This was perhaps most keenly seen in the episode ‘The Crackpots and These Women’ where Leo McGarry’s famous ‘block of cheese speech’ from the title of this post features. The story line follows the lives of ‘crackpots’ who wouldn’t normally gain the attention of the White House being given time and an audience, and the various staffers responses to them… like calling them crackpots, for instance. Toby calls it “Throw Open Our Office Doors To People Who Want To Discuss Things That We Could Care Less About… Day”, Margaret says “it’s definitely a waste of time”, and Sam blows it off with “It’s not so bad. You talk to them for a minute. You give them a souvenir pen.” These marginalized people are made fun of pretty much all day by everyone you admire.

The issue is, as evangelical Gospel-proclaiming Christians, we would probably be the crackpots in this story, not the elite and powerful deciding whether or someone is worthy of their time. And the other, perhaps more glaring problem, is we are called to exactly this type of ministry.

Christians cannot (or perhaps should not) chose the type of people to surround themselves with pastorally. Pastors cannot chose their flock to only consist of who they consider reasonable, fair-minded, rational or agreeable people. We’re called to the weak, the scared, the lonely, the fatherless, and the widow. We’re called to the marginalised, the hurting, and the desperate. We’re called to the voiceless, the helpless, the overlooked, and the rejected. We’re called to rejoice in serving exactly those people.

Smugness has no place in Christian leadership.

Evaluating the worthiness of someone has no place in pastoral aspirations.

We are called to be Christlike – and Jesus didn’t strut.

There’s so much to admire in The West Wing, and it remains on of my favourite shows, but TV doesn’t give us great or at least consistent role models to follow. There’s too much Chandler Bing, Jeremy Clarkson, and Joshua Lymon running our events and preaching our sermons.

As a bit of a contrast, I thought I’d end by quoting the lyrics from Emu Music’s ‘Consider Christ.’

All the best folks – and happy post-post-West Wing day!

Consider Christ, the source of our salvation
That he should take the penalty for me
Though he was pure, a lamb without a blemish;
He took my sins and nailed them to the tree
My Lord and God
You are so rich in mercy
Mere words alone are not sufficient thanks.
So take my life, transform, renew and change me
That I might be a living sacrifice
Consider Christ, that he could trust his Father
In the garden of Gethsemane
Though full of dread and fearful of the anguish;
He drank the cup that was reserved for me.
Consider Christ, for death he has defeated.
And he arose, appeared for all to see.
And now he sits at God’s right hand in heaven
Where he prepares a resting place for me.

Why I prefer talking to young people than adults

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An afternoon spent scrolling through twitter, is usually a year lost from my life. I think it’s important for Christians to engage in public discourse, but one begins to wonder how realistic that is when the phrase ‘discourse’ has been reduced to almost anything shy of throwing our own faeces.

At some point during these ‘discussions’, inevitably the word childish will appear. Like thus:

“Your reasoning is so childish!”

“This is like talking to a child!”

“Oh, grow up, you child!”

And there is it. In the middle of the adult mudslinging comes the claim that low-brow, unintelligent, offensive, churlish, or downright stupid comments are in fact ‘infantile’, more suited to the playground than the arena of adult conversation.

And herein lies my problem. On the whole, I’ve had far more intelligent, nuanced, respectful, gracious, and challenging conversations with young people than adults.

I’m not kidding.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve had lots of stimulating conversations with awesome adults too, however they always come with a lot more effort. Adulthood is a cognitive disease that we suffer against constantly. We’re handicapped in a way young people are largely not.

In Deut. 6:7 we’re told to ‘impress’ the character and commandments of God onto young people. The word impress means to make an impression, so to mould a shape into soft malleable clay before it hardens. If the clay is soft enough, even a feather will make an impression, but once it hardens, you’re going to need an angle grinder to make any change.

Young people are impressionable. Now this comes with dangers and challenges too, but it mostly means that they are so much more open to nuance, questions, discussions, and flexible cognitive growth. All the things we, as set-clay, suck at – technically speaking that is.

Young people will tell us what they think, they will argue, dispute, challenge, and even provoke. But they’ll do all of this without resting on their laurels. They’re trying their strengths – which is totally different to trying to big themselves up by dragging others down.

I love talking to young people.

They understand nuance, they talk, they challenge, they think deeply, they are open, and if you treat them with respect, they will do the same with you.

I wonder if one of the reasons Jesus tells us to accept His Kingdom like a little child (Matt. 18:3) is largely because of this. It’s immensely hard to change an entrenched opinion as an adult, but when talking to young people, an opinion can change nineteen times in ten minutes – without needing to self-justify it. That’s some ninja brain skills right there.

So sure, I like talking with adults. I like well-read, stimulating and challenging conversations, but on the whole these conversations tend to be harder work. With so much ego in play and opinions in stone, it feels more like an running an obstacle course than enjoying in a dance.

I love talking with young people. The surface may be rough, but just underneath they have an intuitive grasp of nuance that we, as adults, should envy not ridicule.

Young people are awesome. Here endeth the rant.

 

Photo by Mihai Surdu on Unsplash

Have we made an idol out of “telling our story?”

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My name is Tim and I am a Kindle addict. I love my Kindle. Carrying hundreds of books around with me with an easy-on-the-eye screen, and a hyper-long battery life in one little package is just awesome. Being a ‘book purist’ I avoided getting one for years, but once I took the plunge, I never looked back. I am a Kindle convert!

The weird thing is even though I bought the Kindle, it’s still insists on being a constant advertisement. When I’m not using it there is always some product, or book, or subscription service flashing up on its screen with a ‘find out more’ button. Although its main function is an e-reader, its main activity seems to be trying to sell me stuff.

There is an uncomfortable overlap here between my Kindle, and the Christian evangelistic experience of young people.

When I became a Christian as a young person, I was told that one of the most fundamental things I needed to do next was to tell all my friends and family the story how it happened. We were encouraged to finetune our ‘before and after’ storylines and given examples of how to explain the ‘moment of conversion.’ We were even taught how to tell our story with enough pith and interest to hold the attention of those who listened. We were given matchsticks and challenged to practice telling our stories before the flame burnt down to our fingers.

Looking back now I notice that there was a very subtle narrative shift: Before I became a Christian, I was told the most precious thing I could have was a relationship with Jesus. After I became a Christian, I was told the most precious thing I had was the story of how it happened. Even much later in my youth groups, I found that deepening my relationship with Jesus still played second fiddle to ‘telling my story’.

Whose story is it?

The problem for me is the pronoun ‘my.’ It’s not my story. Assuming that how I came to salvation is fundamentally my story is to actually displace the main character. Let’s put this another way:

I am a character in Jesus’s story, He is not a character in mine.

The focus on telling my story is me. Jesus plays an important part, but He’s not the central focus. It becomes about what I was like before, and who I am and how I feel now. Jesus becomes a supporting cast member, but I’m getting all the screen time.

The subconscious subscript here is that the universe orbits us and so we have to reorientate our faith-experience around a new narrative which is different to the one that we accepted when we first met with Jesus. The story we stepped into was His – so why would we need to learn a new way of interpreting that in order to ‘do evangelism’?

It’s not my story. We are a scene, or a player in His story.

Aren’t we told in the Bible to ‘tell our stories’?

Well, no. Not really anyway. There is certainly a huge emphasis on storytelling in the Bible, but none of that is telling our story in place of His story.

In the Old Testament stories were passed down generationally and people prayed to ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’ The Jews made regular reference to being freed from Egypt or brought to the promised land – but the focus was always on God and His promises. Each of these stories expounded a trait of God or celebrated His goodness – they all pointed back to Him as the main character.

I think that our philosophy on storytelling today comes instead from misreading a couple of revelatory-conversion stories in the new Testament. Most notably John 4 and Acts 9.

John 4

When Jesus appeared to the woman at the well in John 4, she went back to town to share what happened and many Samaritans believed (v.39). But she told them about Jesus (v.29). They became believers when they heard His words (vv.40-41). They specifically tributed their salvation not to her story but Jesus’ salvation (v.42). The story of the woman at the well is not about the woman at the well – it’s about Jesus being the Christ (vv. 25-26).

Acts 9

We do similar things with Paul’s conversion story in Acts 9. He had a dramatic before-and-after story, but when he started to preach that wasn’t his focus at all. In v.20 he began teaching in the synagogues ‘that Jesus is the son of God.’ Out of all the masses of teaching material that we have from Paul, we only ever find him ‘telling His story’ twice. Once in Acts 26 as part of a legal trial – where his focus was still on Jesus as the messiah (v.23), and once in Galatians 1 as a way of defending his apostleship to a really awkward Church.

The stories told in the New Testament of conversations are always overwhelmed by Jesus Himself. He is clearly and absolutely the main character.

So, what’s the problem?

The problem is that somewhere along the line (I’m suspicious it was largely because of the Church Growth Movement that started in the late 1950s), we started to educate evangelical converts how to tell their stories in order to ‘make more coverts.’ Telling our story with a clear before and after narrative that focused primarily on us rather than the Gospel story of Jesus was seen as the easiest way to do this.

What we do when we take the focus off Jesus and place it on to ourselves is we make Jesus a supporting character, not only in our storytelling, but in our whole lives.

From a mission perspective, people start saying ‘I want to be like them’ or ‘I want that kind of change’ rather than ‘I want to know that Jesus.’ So they begin their Christian walks with an expectation of a functional transformation, rather than a transformative relationship. It becomes about us.

From a prayer perspective, Jesus becomes someone who provides and fixes things, rather than a partner to walk with and learn from. It becomes about us.

From a worship perspective, Jesus becomes the person that makes us feel good, rather than the one we celebrate for being good. It becomes about us.

From a teaching perspective, Jesus becomes the mechanism by which something ‘speaks to me’, so that we decide how good a message was by how much we ‘got out of it’ rather than opening ourselves up to the transformative power of the Word of God outside the realm of ‘application time.’ It becomes about us.

From a discipleship perspective, we don’t go any deeper with Jesus, because we’re always expecting Him to go deeper with us. It becomes about us.

Making Jesus a supporting character is kinda a really big deal! When every part of our faith becomes about us rather than Him, we really are in deep water. Speaking of…

The baby and the bathwater

I’m a storyteller through and through. In my heart of hearts, that’s what I am. I don’t for one second, believe we should devalue our storytelling.

Instead I’d like us to be better story tellers. We need to tell the story of Jesus and be so overwhelmed by that story that our personal experiences become the supporting characters. We need to move the focus back off of ourselves and back onto Jesus. We need to give Jesus more screen time in our testimonies! We will then tell the story of Him from a personal perspective. That’s where healthy empathy is found and the true art of telling ‘my’ story lies.

Storytelling is a beautiful art. All art tells stories. The best of it describes a scene in God’s story. We all tell chapters of that story, and those chapters all point to the same single story. We actually confuse the plot when we twiddle the knobs and rearrange the focus to be on us rather than Him.

Instead, let’s unleash the story of Jesus.

This means we need to know Him far more deeply so that every story we tell becomes a story about Him.

Knowing the story to tell the story

If I want somebody to know how amazing my wife is, I don’t just tell the story of how we met, and if I do, I don’t just focus on me. I tell of her; her gifts, her talents, her virtues, her values. I tell stories of what she has done. I talk about my long-term relationship with her and how that changes me every day. I talk about her.

I can’t tell this story unless I know my wife deeply. I can’t speak with that level of insight and passion without having first taken the time to know her.

We have to spend time relating to Jesus, growing in depth and understanding of who He is. We have to know Him, live with Him, celebrate Him daily, and then we can tell His story.

Teaching someone how to tell their conversion story is a cheap substitute for teaching someone how to know Jesus better. I guarantee you that if your young people grow in depth of relationship with Christ, healthy and fruitful evangelism will certainly follow. You don’t have to teach kids how to talk about things they are passionate about.

All the best!

 

Photo by Reuben Juarez on Unsplash