The Way Ahead - Week 2: Talk about faith

Many years ago, when I was a junior programmer, I remember doing a sales presentation to an important client. This was something that I had worked on for weeks and the account manager and I really wanted to show this potential client what we could do. As the client entered the room the computer that we were using failed. Since this was the days of mainframes, we were left looking at a blank screen. Phone calls told us that the failure would take a while to fix and we would simply have to wait whilst others fixed the system – in the meantime the other members of staff who were present got agitated / annoyed / angry / and abusive, whilst senior management tried to keep the potential client happy in the other room. Peter, the account manager, and I were both Christians and so we decided that we would walk away from where the other were and in the corner of the room where all the equipment was set up, we decided we would pray – which we quietly did. The reaction that this caused from the others who saw what we did was, frankly, awkward. They ranged from laughter, to suggestions that we were not taking things seriously. Peter and I thought we were taking things seriously, we did the only thing we could think of to do, and this was what our faith at the time said was the most serious thing to do.

I don’t know what your reaction to this story is and whose side you would take if you were there. It did cause a great deal of comment at the part of Raytheon where we worked, and we got quite a few positive and negative comments. That said it also seemed to give other people permission to tell us what they thought about our faith, and there were many conversations that followed from this – and when Peter got into trouble with the police it again caused eyebrows to rise.

In more recent times I ended working very closely with a wonderful colleague and friend called Irfan Khan who is now a Senior VP at SAP. He is a devout Muslim and the regular pattern of prayer that is part of their faith became a regular part of both his and my life in the years we worked together. When we had a lab built for us in the UK to allow us to spend less time in the office in the US, we insisted that we had a space allocated for Irfan’s prayer mat, and we made it clear that at 3:00pm Irfan would be saying prayers and the door would be closed. He and I discussed our faith’s for hours and hours, both as we worked in the office, and as we travelled the world together. Of all the people I have met on my faith journey, Irfan is clearly a person who has had a huge impact on my thinking and spiritual development, and I will never deny the presence of God at work in Irfan’s life.

When John Wesley set up his original bands he had a question to ask the band members “Is it your desire and design to be on this and all other occasions entirely open, so as to speak everything that is in your heart, without exception, without disguise, and without reserve?”. In the material this week there is some discussion of the Church Life Profile that the writers did that suggests that some people find it “problematic and even offensive to be asked to share what is deepest in their heart – this is private”, whilst others find it a real “disappointment when they do not feel that their church is a place where they can talk to other Christians about the issues they face living out their discipleship in the world”.

Stop for a moment and consider the following questions before we carry on:

1)      Why do you think many Methodists find it hard to talk about faith? (Ian extra: do you think that the assumption in this question is true?)

2)      How satisfied (or not) do you feel with the conversations about faith that happen around your church?

3)      With whom, and in what contexts, do you in fact feel most able to open up and share what is closest to your heart? What makes those people or contexts safe and fruitful for deep conversation?

One of the reasons that people often feel uncomfortable talking about their Christian faith is that the terms that we use are foreign to those who we are talking to, and the concepts that we accept can be subject to ridicule – “what do you mean he rose from the dead? – do you really believe this?”. Comedians at the moment seem to delight in pointing out some of the Church’s idiosyncrasies and where we do things that simply cannot be defended. I would want to argue that the discussion on Woman Bishops, both in its nature and the way that it has been conducted is a good example of this.

I have heard many sermons over the years talk about how as Christians we are called to be counter cultural, and I would agree, we are. But in accepting this there is a danger that we also suggest that it is acceptable to be culturally irrelevant – and here I would argue that we are not. On the night before Calvary, Jesus said to his disciples “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world—therefore the world hates you.” (John 15:17). The fact that there is something different in our lives should be visible to those around us, and we should accept that some people will talk to us about it – but in accepting this I do not believe that we should simply treat this as a license to do things that make no sense. We want people to see that we are different because of the love that Jesus refers to, and because we stand against many of the things that the world accepts (greed, self-centredness, etc).

In my original two examples I think I would now suggest that the first is a classic case of good intentions leading to something that was pompous and made others feel uncomfortable, whereas the second is one of the most precious memories that I have. They were both counter-cultural but the difference was a sensitivity to others and how they felt – being aware of how others would understand the actions that were taken. Surely the same applies to all the things that we do as Christians beyond the boundary of our church buildings – whether it be what we place on our website, the way we walk through our community with a donkey, or the things we do in Christ’s name; we are called to be counter-cultural but we are not called to be irrelevant or frankly, silly.

Our material this week ends by asking us how much we know about the community that we serve, and asks whether part of our issue as Christians is that we do not know these people, their needs, or their ways of working, meaning that any attempt we have at sharing our faith and being disciples to them are almost certain to fail as we do not the right way to approach them and/or communicate our faith. Put simply we do not know how to be Christians in the real world without risking being or doing something that comes across in the wrong way – and the suggestion is that this results in us doing and saying nothing.

Three questions to end:

1)      Who is telling us the truth, and how can we tell?

2)      Are we powerless to influence things?

3)      Who is our neighbour? How can we discern which community we are called to serve in?

The Way Ahead - Week 1: Talk about Discipleship

At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, the final thing that Jesus says to his gathered followers is “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”(Matthew 28 vs 18 – 20). This has to be one of the most mis-used passages of scripture. You do not want to know the number of times that I have heard it suggested that this is a call to evangelism – when it clearly isn’t – this is a call to discipleship. It even goes into detail on what this means – for those who are being charged by Jesus are to make disciples by passing on what they themselves have received in the time that they spent with him – not by embellishing or adding to this, but simply by teaching the next generation what it was that Jesus had taught them – nothing more, nothing less.

It is fairly widely accepted that within the 12 disciples that Jesus chose there were some who were related to him (his brother, and maybe his nephew), people who had known him for a while, and people who literally gave up everything to follow him simply because he called them. We very much view these early disciples as his “inner circle”, the people that he shared his deepest thoughts with, and the ones that were there with him at the key moments in his ministry. Many of these disciples were so close to Jesus that we know their names almost as well as we know Jesus’ own name, Simon Peter, James and John, but then there were others who are less well known, or only known for a particular role that they had. Andrew only even gets mentioned when he is bringing people to Jesus, and others such as Thaddaeus (sometimes referred to as Judas the Son of James) are only names.

The disciples also came from a wide cross section of positions in society; fishermen, tax collectors, and maybe another carpenter. However, one thing is certain, their response to Jesus was complete and total – they gave up everything and followed him. The other thing that we can recognise that they all had in common was that they were all changed drastically by their experience. Leaving out Judas, for obvious reasons, we only have to look at the disciples before and after the day of Pentecost to see how drastic some of these changes were, but this was only the latest in a series of changes that had been happening all the while that they were with Jesus.

When we talk about discipleship we are drawing links between our journey with the risen Christ and the journey of those early disciples – literally we are trying to learn and put into practice all the things that those first disciples learnt in their time with Jesus. We are trying to learn from them what they learnt from Jesus.

The Time to Talk material this week includes a quote “The term ‘discipleship’ designates the whole life response of Christians to Jesus Christ. Everything a Christian believes and does is an aspect of discipleship: the goal of discipleship is to grow ever more Christ-like in every aspect of life” (Time to talk of God pp19), for in the same way that those early disciples were changed by their encounter and journey with Jesus, so are we.

One of the great failings of churches in general, and part of why I was keen that we should undertake “The Way Ahead” together, relates to another comment from the material, it says “much of church culture fails to make the connections between the gospel and our life in the world explicit, people whose primary energies are expended in their working lives, in businesses, public service, schools or the local community can feel that they do not have a ministry or a vocation.”

The material wants to challenge this and frankly so do I – for Jesus and his disciples did not live out their lives in a biblical bubble but instead they lived in the real world, facing the real issues of living in an occupied land with a violent and unpredictable oppressor in their midst. Those original disciples learnt about what God is all about by being with Jesus in real life situations. If we are to grow in our discipleship then what we learn from Jesus must be relevant to our everyday lives beyond the confines of the church, and if we are truly living as disciples, then hopefully others will see that there is something different about the way that we live our lives and will want to ask questions.

In putting together the material, it’s writers produced a paragraph that pulled together what they saw as a consensus of opinions regarding discipleship - before we get into the questions, see what you think “We agreed there was a sense of call – a disciple feels called and chooses to respond. The call is to a two-way relationship, where God keeps us company and we keep company with God. There has to be a willingness to follow – the disciple is on a lifelong journey of faith as a follower of Jesus and must be willing to ‘go for God’. The journey is not straightforward, but can include moving towards and drifting away from closeness to God. The aim is to become more Christ-like, being like Jesus and doing like Jesus. Discipleship is a discipline that can involve pain and cost; in some choices we make, the gospel asks us to be counter-cultural – how should we live, where do we place ourselves, who or what do we really serve? It also involves discipline; we are committed to learn, to pray, and show our faith in action. In our love of God we will also love our neighbour as ourselves. And in order to go on growing, disciples must be vulnerable, curious, able to live with questions, and full of desire to learn. How can the Church help us to be like this?”(Time to Talk of God pp 20)

So, can I invite you to think about this quote for a while – is this how you understood discipleship, and is this how you understood the journey that you are personally on?

In the sessions this week we will be looking at three questions to get us started:

1.       Which of the following quotes about discipleship can you identify with? Which do you disagree with?

a.       A disciple is an active, intentional learner

b.      A disciple is an apprentice and a practitioner – not just a student of the Word but a doer of it

c.       A disciple is a follower of a particular teacher

d.      A disciple is accountable to someone who knows them and helps them to learn and grow and live

e.      A disciple is outwardly orientated, focused on helping others learn what it means to be a disciple.

2.       What would your own definition of a disciple be?

3.       Think about your own life, and us the following exercises as a basis for conversation:

a.       Draw a “life-line” to represent your life so far, and mark on it the points that are crucial in your development as a Christian disciple, or

b.      Draw a large tree shape, with trunk, roots and branches. If the trunk represents your life as a disciple, think about and write in what you see as the important ‘roots’ of your discipleship. Mark on the ‘branches’ where your life reaches out to, and then put in what you believe or hope are some of the fruits.

Feel free to share your thoughts here, as we will be sharing them in the groups.

The Way Ahead - Here we go!!

This morning, the leaders of the different "Time to talk" groups that make up this part of our 'Way Ahead' met to pray, and to talk through what we would be doing this week. In the discussions that we shared, and in looking at the online material that has been produced, we felt that before sharing this weeks material, we wanted to share something from the introduction to the material - it is a description of the priorities of the Methodist Church as laid out in "Our Calling". We used this material when we were looking at our Vision for the church that we called "Which Way", and the famous post-it note that was produced contained its content broken down into "Our Callings" four parts. So just before we begin, listen to what the material has to say . . .

"Our Calling set out the reasons why the Church exists, namely to encourage worship, learning and caring, service, and evangelism, and the ticket of membership applies these to individual members in their continuing discipleship. This includes the calling to 'grow in faith and support others in their discipleship'.

Priorities for the Methodist Church, adopted in 2004, does not mention the term 'discipleship explicitly, but throughout the document there is an implicit vision of imaginative, empowered, confident Christians who are aware of God's presence, with prayer and worship at the heart of their lives, active for justice in the community, and confident in speaking of the things of God to those within and outside the Church. These disciples are to be made and nurtured in a flexible and innovative church culture, which is creating fresh ways of being Church together, and is focused on the growth of people rather than the maintenance of buildings and institutional structures. Clearly, we have agreed to try to create a culture where we intend to be and to nurture such disciples."

Now read on . . . .