iGod

What stops us from sharing our Christian faith?

To end the week, I came across this profound quote from Christianity Today magazine:

"How much to you have to hate somebody not to proselytise?  How much do you have to hate someone to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?"
Penn Jillette, atheist, comedian, film-maker, recounting someone giving him a Bible.

ASD

The trouble with wearing different hats

As a good number of you know I currently do two jobs: church pastor and brand strategy planner. In the Vineyard we call this bi-vocational. Occasionally, the mental pressure shows when I try to be equally committed to both jobs. This is when my brain gets all confused over which hat I should be wearing for which occasion.

I have to say my church are wonderfully supportive and understanding, even when I turn up to a meeting with the look of a lost American tourist in Luton.

Recently my friend Dave from Gateway Vineyard, Dartford sent me a video clip of a famous Tommy Cooper sketch and gave me a good chuckle. It sums up my current lifestyle nicely.

This is for all church planters everywhere.

ASD

How do you get over a Cold/Flu without complaining?

I am feeling really groggy and ill with a cold or flu at the moment. Whatever you want to call it, it's a nasty one.  The trouble is, like most guys,I am a dreadful patient and I am not sure I have much of a theology for God healing me of the Common Cold or Man Flu. So to try avoid the self-pity trap I try and think of someone else who has had it tougher than me recently.

One guy who has helped me get my temporary misery in perspective is Roger Molloy.  I met him in Shoreditch, London and has turned his traversity into an opportunity.  Roger had his photographic gear stolen over a year ago.  All he had left was his camera phone, so he took shots with it and then made them into postcards, which he sells for £1 each in his make shift gallery in E1 to help buy new equipment. Truly inspirational.

Here is just one of his shots which I recently bought, but check out his work to see more.

It's not quite Lemsip. but it does help with some of the side-effects.

ASD

The Comedian versus the Scientist

It seems a head of steam has built over a written comment made by popular comedian Peter Kay.

Contentious author Richard Dawkin of The God Delusion has publicly attacked the man by saying his view of God being a comfort is laughable. "How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?" he asks.

Peter Kay makes the comment in his autobiography, The Sound Of Laughter, which sold more than 600,000 copies in six weeks.

The comedian states that he doesn’t actually believe in the divinity of Christ: "I think Jesus was just an ordinary person, like me and you." But Kay does go on to say that "I believe in a God of some kind, in some sort of higher being. Personally I find it very comforting". Okay, so he is a deist.

Well, at this stage the gauntlet is well and truly thrown down, not that Kay was aware of how much of a kerfuffle would be caused when he wrote these lines.

"If evidence for a Supreme Being were found, I would change my mind instantly - with pride and great surprise. Would I find it comforting? What matters is what is true and we discover the truth by evidence and not by what we would like."

This may sound gracious and scholarly, but let’s just unpack that statement for a moment. For a start, Peter Kay is a comedian and isn't asking to be 'taken seriously'.  He is not a vitriolic Mark Thomas figure or a political satirist like Rory Bremner. So let’s see the place of genre in all of this. He is a light entertainer.

I do respect Richard Dawkins as being a total egghead in his field. Has been a gift to biological science.  He has made a particular aspect of science understandable and accessible, but let’s be honest, he does come across as a bit of a ninny sometimes.  Remember when he described that poor BA female worker as having a “stupid face”?

I remember being told by old lecturer that when you mock the opposite view with flippant comments it weakens your own argument. People stop listening to what you want them to and listen to the ‘noise’.

Here’s an interesting viewpoint that appeared in yesterday’s Daily Mail:

“Science is a particular language. It can help us understand the world in a scientific way. But there are other languages, which are not necessarily either stupid or invalid.
When a scientific experiment advances our knowledge, we feel something like satisfaction; a piece of jigsaw has been put in place. I think this is very like the "comfort" which Richard Dawkins professes to despise. He does not know the language in which Peter Kay was speaking.

By saying that he believed in some sort of God, and that he believed it comforting, Peter Kay lines himself up with the Book of Psalms, with the Elizabethan metaphysical poet George Herbert, with Tolstoy in War And Peace, with Bach and Beethoven.”

I know Dawkins has his loyal disciples, but listen to some of their stories and often there is a bad religious experience in there somewhere. One old chestnut is that religion is controlling and takes away the mind’s ability to think for itself.  However, I think Dawkins’ form of secularist fundamentalism is as equally controlling. Balance is needed.

As for the place of comfort, I really don’t have a problem in people’s entry point to Christianity being through the need for comfort. Imagine if Jesus saw Lazarus’ family grieving and said, “For goodness sake, pull yourself together, everybody!”

Take away the God of comfort and suffering becomes totally unbearable. Because where there is godly comfort, Christian hope is not too far away.

We go through life maybe battling with God’s perceived limited involvement in the world, even rail against him when personal tragedy strikes hits us. Yet at the same time, the Bible tells of his faithfulness to us.

Yes, there are times when I feel terribly uncomfortable with the Christian experience, it causes heartache, especially when God appears silent. Nothing appears to make sense. A that point I am exactly on the same page as the writer of Ecclesiastes when he wrote, “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.” But the nihilism of science does absolutely nothing to comfort me. I t merely makes me a hard-hearted human being.

Time to find the Phoenix Nights DVD.

ASD