There is a famous joke about going to church which goes something like this:
“One Sunday a mother shook her son awake, telling him it was time to go to church, but he would not stir. Ten minutes later she was back: “Get out of bed immediately and go to church”. “Mother, I don’t want to-it’s so boring, so why should I bother?”. “For two reasons: you know you must go to church on a Sunday, and secondly, you are the Bishop to the diocese…”
As funny as this is, there is like a number of jokes about church, a serious point to mull over. The Bishop in the joke may have had a point because quite often people ‘say yes to Jesus but no to the Church’. Reasons for that tend to fall into the idea that going to church amounts to little more than older people gathering in a cold building to listen to overlong, tedious sermons. If truth be told, there are some churches like that, because as a new Christian, some 30+ years ago, I went to them, and I was struck by the huge contrast between what I learnt in the Gospels and what the reality of being a believer in some of our churches was like. That forced me to look around and I have over the years found churches that do reflect the love, compassion, joy and fruitfulness that Jesus taught.
Church attendance is, as we know, in steep decline, but it doesn’t have to be like that. In a number of places, churches are thriving. Those churches generally have a few things in common in that they :
Have a clear mission and purposein that they are know who they are, what they stand for, what they are trying to do and how they are going to achieve that;
Actively Engage – churches who know their local community and who reach out to them are the ones that grow especially those who harness the positive power of social media;
Are willing to adapt and change – churches that regularly look at what they do in terms of worship style and are open to change things when they work, tend to be the ones that thrive and be attractive to the ‘unchurched’ (those new to the faith);
Have lay people who are active in their leadership-churches that have lay volunteers who take an active role in their leadership are more likely to thrive;
Actively engage with children and young people-churches that invest in young people and families such as employing a Children’s or Youth Worker are shown to be a growing faith community;
Are welcoming- churches that have an ‘open door’ to their communities are the ones that build relationships with people that lead to church growth;
Nurture disciples- those that offer Life Groups or discipleship programmes that encourage Christian witness show growth;
Have leaders who envision and motivate people-churches that have people who energise and empower people help deliver the message in Ephesians 4:11-13 that Christ equipped us so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith, to become mature and attain the fullness of Christ.
There is no ‘instant magic recipe’ for churches to thrive and reverse the trend of church non-attendance, but it can be done by adopting some of the above healthy habits that encourage people to want to become involved and hear the Gospels that will, if they let it, change their lives for the better.
Wherever you look at the moment there is ‘Barbie’! The release of the film about the Mattel fashion doll that was launched way back in 1959 has become a global cultural phenomenon. Within a couple of months, it has become the 7th most popular film in UK Box Office history, and the 15th highest grossing movie in the world of all time-and is already available to stream. It has also ignited a lot of talk about women, their role in society, and where men fit into that as well.
However, for me the really interesting thing about ‘Barbie’s colossal success is how influenced it is by the Bible stories. When I, with the encouragement of a female friend took the plunge to see the film, I thought to myself “..I know this story…”, and people of faith viewing it may have the same reaction.
If you have so far escaped ‘Barbie’, the story is set in ‘Barbieland’, where Barbie lives somewhere where there is no aging, no death, no pain, no shame or self-consciousness…but then suddenly she becomes self-conscious…. Now, where or what does that remind you of?
It is of course Genesis 3, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve and ‘The Fall’. Now in case you think I am reading too much into what could just be a joyous, fluffy and very pink comedy, its writer/director Greta Gerwig has spoken about the parallels between the Bible and Barbie and that it was a conscious choice she made to link them together. She talked about being brought up in a Catholic school and how the Bible stories continue to resonate with her. Although taught as a Catholic, she was brought up and still attends a Unitarian Universalism Church- the spiritual movement that evolved from Protestant Puritan movements, and you see that influence in ‘Barbie’.
She also pointed out that a central scene where Barbie meets her maker -not in this case God but the spirit of the real life Barbie creator Ruth Handler- was specifically framed to look like Michelangelo’s fresco painting of ‘The Creation of Adam’ in the Sistine Chapel, where of course God gives life to Adam.
Where the film differs from Genesis 3 though is that it is Man in the form of Barbie’s boyfriend Ken, that is created for Woman (Barbie) rather than the other way round. The most touching moment of the film for me is when Barbie and Ken have to leave their Garden of Eden to go the real World to make things right again in Barbieland. There the two of them become very self-conscious with people looking at them- all that is missing is them wearing fig leaves!
‘Barbie’ although seen as a feminist film is in effect a very optimistic, happy film which tells its audience that it is OK to be vulnerable, that change in life is inevitable and through the gift of goodwill our futures are ours to make. Barbie’s maker does not force her to act in a particular way- that is left to Barbie and in a real sense to all of us.
Its huge success tells us something else too. That no matter how challenging current society is for Christians and the Church, the Bible’s ‘soft power’ and influence is very much present and ‘on trend’, as its adapted stories continue to excite and engage modern audiences even if they are covered under huge layers of pink!
I am currently reading ‘What is the Point of Being a Christian?’ by Fr Timothy Radcliffe, a Dominican Friar, that won the Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing, chosen by no less than the Archbishop of Canterbury. The genesis of the book was that the author had a friend- a committed Christian- who had a son who kept on at his father saying: “What is the point of being a Christian? What do you get out of it? Why carry on?”
So Timothy Radcliffe wrote the book to address those questions as he feels that younger people are seeing themselves as the ‘Last Generation’, through the despair they feel about the world and who are living through a kind of crisis of hope and in it the author explains why he thinks the answer to his friend’s son’s questions is a clear and concise one: “The point about ‘why be a Christian?’ is simply: “Because it is true”. That is important because our faith points us to God who is the point of everything, in other words the ‘point’ of Christianity is to point to God as the meaning of our lives so that we can have the confidence that there is after all some ultimate point to human existence to turn despair into hope.
However, the book realises that in itself is not enough to convince people to be Christian, to successfully engage with people you have to show the difference being a Christian makes not just to your own life but those around you-the impact of it all. Go back to 2nd and 3rd century where people talked about how astonished they were at how the early Christians loved each other, one person said of them “ …they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking way of life, they dwell in their own countries but simply as sojourners (temporary residents), as citizens they share in all things with others and yet endure all things as if foreigners…”.
Where the book hugely succeeds is in Timothy Radcliffe’s eloquence and wit but he focuses on what you could call ‘the strong meat of belief’, bridging that gap between academic and popular theology.
He is at his best when he outlines for example what the Church tends to be against what it could and should be. He comments that people should look at Christians and be puzzled by our astonishing liberty and freedom, but that often Church and the Christian community is usually seen as something which is telling people why they must not do what they want and must do what they do not want. What we need to be is a place of evident freedom, courage, joy and hope- somewhere that is a home for everyone, especially those whose lives are a mess. As the author makes clear “..It is fitting that the first Christian to make it to Paradise was the thief who was crucified beside Jesus.”
The image of what we should be as a Church in order that the unchurched are willing to learn from us is a place where we can speak convincingly about God being a place of mercy and mutual delight of joy and freedom- as Radcliffe says “If we are seen to be timid people, afraid of the world and afraid of each other, then why should anyone believe a word of what we say?”. What a challenge!
How do you read the Bible? I ask because we rightly often talk of the need for regular, ideally daily, study of the scriptures, but we spend less time explaining how best to understand them.
There has for example been a tradition of ‘Bible inerrancy’, that is to say that the Bible is without error or fault in all its teaching. The problem with that belief is that it is humans who have written and edited the Bible- not God. He is infallible. We are not.
Part of the problem I suspect is that some Christians tend to take a very fundamental approach to Bible literacy to such a degree that they can interpret what is said as meaning exactly what it says. In a lot of cases that is true- for example when in Matthew 22:37-39, Jesus says:
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all they mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”
That is a direct commandment we must follow-no ifs, no buts- it needs little analysis or thought about what Jesus means by that.
But elsewhere in both the Old and New Testaments, prophets and indeed Jesus himself, use metaphors to make a point and they were never intended to be taken literally but as a vivid illustration of what we should do-they told stories to make a point because that is how we understand things. I suppose the most obvious one is Jesus’ teaching earlier on in Matthew 5:29 when he said:
“If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into sin”.
To believe that Jesus want us to self-amputate our eye if it is a problem is a horrifically false reading of the Gospel, although rather scaringly, it is claimed that one Christian scholar, Origen of Alexandria, self-castrated himself because of his literal reading of another part of Matthew -gulp!. What Jesus means though is if there is something about you that makes you sin then you should get rid of it or at least avoid it. For example, if you have a group of friends who are not good or healthy for you, or who take you away from God and his teachings, then change your relationships with them-they may not be good for you.
I recall the great writer CS Lewis rejecting the literal reading of the Bible because of a number of passages which disproved the argument that every statement in Scripture must be historically true. They are not falsehoods but when reading something in the Bible I think we need to ask ourselves one overriding question- what is this author trying to tell me? Are they reporting a literal event or piece of teaching that I need to accept and act on, or is it maybe a metaphor that requires us to understand in order that we should live our faith and our lives to the glory of God?
