Archive for year: 2020

In my last post I wrote an open letter to the church asking all of us, myself included, to spend more time caring for the lost and isolated than we do grumbling about each other and the ‘state of affairs’ online. I led that with it’s not ok to not be ok.

Today I want to double underline that it is, in fact, ok to not be ok. Ish. Kinda.

I don’t shake failure easily. I carry it around like a heavy bag over my shoulder full of bricks, and little evil gremlins with hammers and pitchforks. It’s heavy, and it hurts, and if left unchecked it only gets heavier. Here’s two examples of pretty colossal failures in my ministry.

In my first full-time youth min job I ran a ‘large’ youth event. I brought in the biggest speaker I’ve ever commissioned for any event, I decked out a hall, sorted a band and a PA, and I purchased so many doughnuts! I expected a large crowd of young people to show up. All the signs were that they were going to. They didn’t. I ended up with a small handful at best. There were more people on the stage than under it. To this day I don’t understand what happened.

I remember then having to explain to the church leadership team where it went wrong, and why I’d spend so much money. I remember exactly how that felt.

The other story involves a young girl in a meeting. I was fresh out of Bible College, and a question was asked of the main group leader (not me), about heaven and hell. I interjected a smarmy, know-it-all, and frankly irrelevant response about predestination that totally freaked that girl out. She was shaken and clearly afraid, and she said across the room that she would never, ever come to me for help. She always had before, but she never did again.

These memories, and others like them, are part of who I am. A little bit like ptsd, I tend to relive rather than just remember these failures too. They dig deep and they put down roots – but there’s more to it than that.

Failure isn’t actually the problem

The thing that gnaws about memories like these isn’t actually failure. Failure can cut, but that’s not where the pain is. Failure might be the sword, but it’s not the sword itself that hurts. The wound is what hurts. The wound is what bleeds. The wound is where the pain’s located.

It’s not the thing that happened, it’s the thing that the thing that happened caused. So, what is that?

That wound is shame.

It’s not the failure that burns, it’s the shame of that failure. The more we fail, and the more that shame goes unchallenged and untreated, the deeper it burrows, and the more it festers. A festering wound grows toxic; it stops the wound from scaring, and it keeps us unhealthy.

As a youth worker I’ve gotten a lot wrong in my time. We all do, right? I’ve failed a lot. And that’s ok. It is. It’s ok to get things wrong. It’s expected. The best of us do! The greatest people we admire are covered in exactly these types of battle scars. There’s a difference, though, between wound and scars.

When wounds don’t scar

The problem though – and here’s when it’s not ok to be not ok – is when those wounds remain wounds.

Wounds are supposed to become scars. The tissue will never be exactly the same again, but that’s the thing about a scar. It leaves you changed; you are different than you were before. A wound, though, is not a scar. A scar is messy, perhaps unsightly, but it’s no longer a risk. A wound is still dangerous.

Wounds need to scar, or they will not heal.

Shame has to be treated, or it will not disappear.

I think shame is one of the most insidious ways the devil attacks us as youth workers. He whispers things like, ‘You got that wrong,’ ‘you failed,’ ‘you let everybody down,’ ‘you let vulnerable people down,’ ‘ you let parents down,’ ‘you let your employer down,’ ‘you let God down.’ When we fail, he attacks the wound relentlessly. He throws all his weight at it and does everything in his power to keep it from scarring.

Shame is a wound that needs to be treated, and it needs to be treated with the healing, Jesus-driven power of gospel truth. So we need to recalibrate – from the Bible – how we see failure and shame, and in doing so, thoroughly disarm Satan of this method of attack.

So, let’s do some healing theology.

A theology of condemnation

Satan is sometimes called the accuser, which is fitting, but therein lies his defeat.

For someone to accuse you of something, they have to appeal to a law, or a rule that you’ve broken. They have to have an agreed standard to go off, something to condemn you against.

So, if someone says ‘you’re late’ they have to appeal to an agreement you made about what time constituted ‘being on time’. If you get a speeding ticket, there needs to be a speed limit sign and a law to back that up.

An accusation doesn’t work without an agreed standard. They go hand-in-hand.

The standard that Satan appeals to; the one that he uses (or more accurately the one he manipulates) is God’s revealed standard. Usually that comes down to the moral or legal code that God gave in the Old Testament. That’s the thing that could condemn us.

Hopefully now your shouting at the screen – but we’re not condemned by the law anymore, Tim, haven’t you heard about grace?!

And you are absolutely right! Which means Satan, in reality, has nothing on us.

Colossians 2:13-14 says this:

When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.

That very standard then, which would have condemned us – that Satan is trying to trick us into thinking still condemns us – has been nailed to the cross. That means every possible broken piece of God’s law has been paid for by Jesus dying for us. The standard itself has been paid for – not just the consequences of falling short of it. There is nothing left to accuse you against.

This doesn’t mean that the Old Testament law is bad, or useless, or even obsolete, but it does mean that there is no possible wrong that you could ever do that hasn’t been fully and completely paid for on the cross.

Say it with me. Through Jesus you are actually, in reality, not guilty (1 Cor. 6:11; 2 Cor. 5:21). This is literally what the doctrine of justification means.

So, where is your shame?

If you trust in Jesus, there is no eternal or legal cause for your shame. This means that Satan has nothing; nothing on you. There is, eternally, no charge that can stick against you. Whatever he says is literally impotent. It’s useless.

Colossians 2 goes futher than this. It says in v.15,

‘And having disarmed the powers and authorities’ (one of Paul’s phrases for Satan and co., check out Eph.6:12)… ‘he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.’

Satan is disarmed and then hauled out as the fool he is.

Don’t give the devil his power back

When we hold on to shame from failure, we re-empower the standard that Jesus died for. We give Satan his weapon back – it’s like we’re trying to rob the cross of its power.

However, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:1).

Yes, I have failed. You probably have too. Yup. And it sucks.

Learn to mourn it. Grieve. Confess it, don’t just cower from it, or cover it up. Learn from it. Apologise, grow, and move on.

Yes, it will shape you and it will change you. It probably should. But don’t salt the wound and stop it from healing. Don’t believe the accusations. God is far more powerful than your failure. In fact, He often shows up and does miracles right in the very middle of that failure.

In Lk. 24:19-21, the disciples believed that the death of Jesus was a failure, and shame had begun to fester. It was then that Jesus told them that through that very act of ‘failure’ was actually the victory they were waiting for (vv.25-27).

In Gen. 50:20, Joseph is reflecting on all the harm is brothers had caused him, and he told them that the very act which caused harm, God meant it for good. The very same place of pain was God’s place of salvation.

When you dwell on the shame of failure, you not only empower Satan, but you might even miss what God is doing in you.

You are not guilty. A failure, sometimes, and maybe, but still not condemned.

If you’re still carrying the shame of failure, maybe now is the time to fess up, revisit the gospel, and spend some time on your knees with the prince of grace.

It’s worth it. Trust me.

Best.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

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

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!

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

I’m coaching this morning and preparing a series of lecture videos on youth work leadership – which has bought me back again to this document I put out a few years ago. Please spend some time with it – I really believe it’s valuable.

All the best.

t.

Please answer as many questions you can honestly and prayerfully. This is not something you need to defend, but it might contain something you need to confront.

Over the lat 12 months…

1. What training / networks have you attended?
2. Who is mentoring you?
3. Who is your line-manager?
4. Who do you talk to about your personal faith (growth and struggles)?
5. Which volunteer(s) have you released to take greater responsibility?
6. What would happen to your projects if you had to suddenly take 6 months out?
7. Who are you discipling personally?
8. Of your ‘top five gifts’, how many are you using regularly?
9. What relevant books have you read?
10. What date nights / play-dates / visits with friends have you cancelled?
11. Which non-Christians have you connected with personally?
12. Have you made opportunities to discreetly serve others without recognition?
13. Are you giving?
14. How many days off have you not taken?
15. What things have you said ‘no’ to and why?
16. Did you book a holiday in advance?
17. Do you regularly start and end your day with Jesus?
18. How do you feel when you are worshipping God with others?
19. Are you regularly worshipping God alone?
20. Do you speak with God about both deep and trivial things?
21. Does God get opportunities to speak to you?
22. How would you rate your gratitude level?
23. What personal shortcomings have you actively identified and worked on?
24. Can you honestly say you love Jesus?

Photo by Seven Shooter on Unsplash