John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

The global enterprise dealing in the area of behavioural alteration… that’s the church

John’s Notes - Parish Magazine editorial, August 2018

I like the story which the Christian speaker J. John tells about the way he avoids admitting to  people he’s just met that he’s a ‘Reverend’, because of the preconceptions people carry about that role, and instead being creative in telling people what he does.

Once J. John got into conversation with the lady sat beside him on a flight to the Far East.

“She asked me, ‘What do you do?’ and I said, ‘Well….’ (a pregnant pause) ‘… I work for a global enterprise.’

“She said, ‘Do you?’

“I said, ‘Yes I do. We’ve got outlets in nearly every country of the world.’

“She said, ‘Have you?’

“I said, ‘Yes we have. We’ve got hospitals and hospices and homeless shelters. We do marriage work, we’ve got orphanages, we’ve got feeding programmes, educational programmes. We do all sorts of justice and reconciliation things. Basically, we look after people from birth to death, and we deal in the area of behavioural alteration.’

“She went, ‘Wow!’ And it was so loud, her ‘Wow!’, loads of people turned round and looked at us.

“She said, ‘What’s it called?’

“I said, ‘It’s called the church … have you not heard of it?’”

J. John celebrates that, if we are a follower of Jesus then we are part of a global enterprise: and “not only global, but intergalactic, because it includes everyone that’s gone before us.’”

The global enterprise dealing in the area of behavioural alteration… that’s the church. I find this very encouraging at a time when the grumpy old broadsheets keep elegising Christianity in what are reportedly its twilight years. For ‘the church’ is far more than just Sunday worship in the traditional denominations. It is to be found among the many, many people inspired in some ways by the Spirit of God to reach out towards others: a whole variety of people who are very active indeed. 

This is behavioural alteration: where, in a world which asserts that we should do everything we can to be rich and powerful, some choose to live and work alongside the poor. In a world which encourages us to toughen up and harden ourselves against all feelings of loss, there are some giving themselves in friendship to those who mourn and feel grief and loss. In a world which measures success by how much of the time you are thinking only of yourself and your own happiness, some, inspired by Christ, hunger and thirst for the common good and aren’t satisfied with the status quo. Where the highest value in society is independence and the aggressive pursuit of higher status in the social pecking order, behavioural alteration is displayed by those who are merciful and compassionate, their openness and sincerity operating through unadulterated motives. In a world which encourages us to strike back quickly when others strike us, and guard our image so we‘ll always be popular, how encouraging to find many working for peace and reconciliation, persevering even when they’re misunderstood and misjudged. They inspire me … you inspire me to alter my own behaviour, when I see them, and see you doing that. 

 

 

 

Notes

Article extracted from my talk The global enterprise with a different set of values, Somerset, United Service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, 2016.

Material drawn on here:

[1] J. John, How To Explain What You Do, When You're A Pastor, YouTube,Trinity Broadcasting Network interview, 13 Nov 2014 (slice).

[2] ‘Behavioural alteration’ section based on Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation and Activation, Chapter 27: A New Identity, p.157-161, altered.

Use your loaf: even if it's half-baked

When Barbara the Methodist minister was told her church building was going to be sold off and not replaced, she had to use her loaf.

“I want you to carry on serving in the centre of Liverpool,” said the Methodist superintendent. Lacking the usual ingredients for a ministry: no building, no congregation, Barbara had to start from scratch. ...

... the story of Barbara Glasson and the formation of Somewhere Else, Liverpool city centre's 'bread church' is my talk today, Use your loaf: even if it's half-baked.

The spirit of Jesus and the ghost of John

Jesus came from another world altogether than the world which John and Herod understood and in which they danced their antagonistic dance. It is possible that Herod could neither admire nor fear Jesus because he just could not comprehend Jesus’ message, a message of absolute love for neighbours, allies and enemies alike, which Jesus manifested on the cross when he asked his Father to forgive all those who had conspired to put him there, Herod Antipas among them.

- from today's talk, The spirit of Jesus and the ghost of John.

The Resurrection: Mary meets the Emancipator in Chief

... the good news is this. God, through the gospel writers, put Crazy Mary at the heart of the resurrection story. When Jesus put death to bed by rising again he made sure that Mary was chief witness to the events of that morning.

What this tells us about Christ is that he is the Emancipator in Chief. He is in the business of setting people free from legal, social, or political restrictions; of liberation. Choosing Mary to be the channel of the greatest news ever told - that is the emancipation of women writ large. It took nineteen-hundred years for our society to catch up, two thousand years for the Church to catch up with what Jesus did that day - put women on equal footing with men in this world. More than equal footing, in Mary’s case. Elevated. ...

- from my talk for the festival of Mary Magdalene: The Resurrection: Mary meets the Emancipator in Chief.

In our village Jesus has no place

 ... We liked Jesus the youth, devoted to learning, devoted to prayer. For those of us who find learning and prayer difficult he seemed to be acting for us, on our behalf, living out his life that way. We appreciated and accepted him when he was our devout young carpenter.

But we don’t like Jesus the teacher, whose teachings seem to directly attack the way we are. We don’t want to be told how to live alongside others in our village; we don’t want our ways challenged. We don’t want to change our ways. We certainly don’t want to have to think about reaching out with all our heart and energy to those we dislike or don’t know. We don’t want to sit at Jesus’ feet to learn from him how we can heal old wounds and make a fresh start in relationships gone sour. 

If that’s what Jesus wants from us then we don’t want him here any more. He’s got no place in our village any more because in our village we don’t do things his way, we refuse to learn how to do things his way. His word is an offence to us. We’ll carry on the same old way without him. We’ll carry on with our family lives and working lives, our attendence at public worship, our social lives, just as we always have. And having given Jesus his marching orders, no-one need realise that we ever knew him.

- I'm trying this one out in my new parishes today: In our village Jesus has no place.

If God did not make death, we need to talk about it again

‘God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living,’ wrote Solomon in the book of Wisdom. ‘For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them, and the dominion of Hades is not on earth.’

This is a bold and radical passage of scripture. And if it is true, we need to talk about it.

Now, I know that most of us don’t like to talk about death at all. We are a society of death-deniers. Our culture is death-phobic. Our instinct is to deny the reality of death, to resist our mortality.

Whether through our reliance on anti-wrinkle creams, high-energy drinks, vitamin supplements - designed to counteract our sense of ageing and decay;

Whether through our practice of quickly giving over our loved ones to funeral directors and doing all our mourning without their physical presence; [1]

Whether through suppressing our fear of nuclear annihilation in the face of disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima and the dangerous posturing of hawkish presidents; [2] and persisting in denying climate change despite the overwhelming scientific opinion that human activity is unequivocally warming the Earth's climate system: [3]

… our instinct is to deny the reality of death, to resist our mortality.

The certainty of death is real; we must face it. The threat of death is powerful, and we are all affected by it. So how important it is that we do grasp the need to talk about these things. And as Christians, to grapple with the significance of the wisdom of Solomon before us today.

For if God did not make death: we need to talk about it....

The start of my talk today, If God did not make death, we need to talk about it (again... based on a 2015 talk).