Except some of it won’t.

I have produced some archive volumes of kouyanet material which you can buy for your Kindle here. I’ve also started a Substack publication where I will be reposting a lot of the material from Kouyanet so that it is still available when this website isn’t. Please feel free to subscribe to the Substack and tell others about it.

Why am I doing this? Well, I still hear from people that they value the material on this blog. However, when I made the Kindle archives along with PDF options (links below), the take up was very low – so low in fact that it wasn’t worth keeping up with the effort of producing them. So, before everything vanishes, I thought I would have one more try.

Let’s see what happens…

Archives as PDFs

• Books I Have Read
• People in Mission
• Bible Translation
• Mission Agencies

Warning – you do have to pay a small sum for these downloads, but each one involves hundreds of hours of reading and work, so I think that’s fair.

However…

If you would like to get more of my thoughts on Life the Universe and Everything, then I have started a Substack; Living in the Venn diagram. Here is a short quote from the introductory post.

My intention with this substack is to write one short essay a week. Iâ€m not planning on covering one particular subject, rather I want to look at a theme; they way things interact. Iâ€ll look at faith, mission, science, the environment, politics and anything else that takes my interest and Iâ€ll consider the ways in which one thing impacts the other. I may do the standard thing of looking at science through the lens of an Evangelical Christian, but Iâ€ll also look at Evangelical Christianity through the eyes of a scientist. The intention is that this should be a substack written by a Christian, rather than a Christian substack, if that makes sense. I should add that Iâ€m not aiming to annoy or upset anyone with what I write, but I expect I will – I seem to have a talent for it.

You can also find me on TikTok and Bluesky as Oldmanintights.

Today is the first of October and a couple of things happen this month. Firstly, I in a couple of weeks, I’m due to hit retirement age and I should get my free bus pass (I’m already working out running routes that I can link up by bus in the Dales). Secondly, October is the month when I have to pay the domain and hosting fees for Kouya.net.

My plan is to pay for the website this year, but in a year’s time, I will cancel the standing order and after almost 20 years, this blog will vanish from the Internet. I’ll undoubtedly post a few things between now and then; I have a book review or two to do and Rev, Dr, Prof Avril Poisson will probably have some stunning new discovery in the Spring.

I will find a way to make the reports that I do on mission agency finance and such like available online, but the blog itself will go the way of all flesh. I did start producing archives of the blog and making them available for a small fee. However, it takes a lot of work to produce the archives and the take up has been more or less non-existent, so I’ve decided to stop after producing the first four of a planned ten volumes. To be honest, it’s been a bit discouraging. If you are interested you can find the archives here or for Kindle.

Over the next few days, I will install a plugin that makes it possible for you to download individual blog posts as Word or PDF files; it will look a bit ugly, but it works.

On a related note, as I’ve mentioned previously, I have listed an awful lot of my books for sale on the site. So far, I’ve only posted about half of the ones I want to sell, but again, the take up has been very limited (thanks to those who have bought books), so in the next month or so, I’m going to withdraw them from here and sell them through an app. This isn’t my first choice as I’ll make less money and the books won’t go to people I’m connected to, but needs must. Anyhoo, if you are in the market for mission books or if you know someone who might be interested, this is the place to look.

One of the first things that a board must do is to take a sober look at their own agency and the situation in which they are operating. The world is changing rapidly and the environment for world mission is vastly different to what it was a decade ago, much when I first started in mission work in the 1980s. Despite this, I still encounter mission board members whose vision of mission is rooted in an understanding of mission being from the Christian West to the needy rest of the world. I’d strongly encourage all board members to watch the video below (sorry for blowing my own trumpet).

I would also suggest that boards should look at my reports on agency finances which would allow them to gain an understanding of how their organisation is faring compared to the rest of the sector. These two papers may be of help 1, 2.

The second part of the process is for the board to have a clear picture of where they see the agency in the next five or ten years. It is the role of the CEO to lead the agency towards the board’s vision. It’s no good at all to appoint someone to lead if you don’t know where you are going. Equally, a board should not appoint a CEO to work out a vision for them; that’s getting the horse and the cart thoroughly muddled. Of course, the CEO should be involved in any future vision setting, but it is the board’s responsibility to ensure that it happens.

Nothing I’ve written so far applies specifically to appointing a CEO, this is stuff that the board should be working on all the time; but it does come into focus at hiring time.

The actual recruitment process is essentially similar to appointing any staff member and there are good HR consultancies who can help with the process if that is needed.

However, there is one big question that often arises, should the appointment be internal or external?

Looked at from one angle, the choice seems to be clear. There are many, many more people who are not members of the agency than who are and so it seems far more likely that a good CEO can be found from outside of the organisation than from the inside.

However, many people who work inside agencies would dispute this. They would argue that the particular agency has its own traditions and ways of doing things, that their organisation is uniquely complex and that only someone who has worked with them could ever understand all of the issues that a CEO has to grasp. This argument says that an internal appointment is essential. I’ll admit. that I used to share this opinion, but over the last decade or so I have changed my mind, let me explain why.

Firstly, a good leader can learn to work in a new organisational culture; no one would question a CEO moving from say Marks and Spencer to Dyson, despite them being very different organisations, so why couldn’t someone move between two mission agencies?

Secondly, having been a member of one agency for almost forty years and having done research into the agency sector as a whole and done consultancy work for a variety of specific agencies, I’m simply not convinced that agencies are as individual as they think they are. I fully understand why insiders (like me) think their agency – or family – is special, but in truth they have a lot more in common than they think. The sorts of things that people emphasise when talking about their own agency are the complicated membership and support structures, the complexity of being a UK charity that has to relate to an international governing body and so on – but many agencies share these issues. The details may differ, but not the big questions.

The bottom line is that a potential CEO should have the skills and flexibility to work in a new organisation and to learn its culture. This does not necessarily mean that an outsider should be appointed, but the idea should not be ruled out of hand. I would argue that anyone who has worked in the non-profit sector – charity, government, education and so on – could be considered. The transition from profit based organisations to agency work is much harder because the concept of the “bottom line” is much harder to conceptualise.

This brings me to the last point. I said at the start that appointing a CEO may be the most important thing a board does. Actually, I think that there is one thing that is even more important; ensuring that the CEO is successful is more important than appointing them. This means that there should be a thought through and adequately resourced program of orientation for any new CEO. Even if they are an insider, they will have new things to learn and they need to be helped to learn them; an outside will have different needs, but it is the board’s responsibility to help them.

However, there was one tableau in the middle which I found rather strange, when a group including drag queens appeared to imitate Leonardo’s Last Supper (see above). It’s hard to understand the motivation behind this piece. My suspicion is that the producers (those doing the mise en Seine – sorry) thought that it would be funny, after all the Minions had just mocked another Leonardo masterpiece. It probably occurred to them that some Christians might get offended by the show, but I suspect that in La France Laique they didn’t worry about that.

So what did I think of it? Well, I found it offensive, I also found it childish. It seemed like a sixth form school play where the pupils were trying to get away with something offensive, but not sure how to really do it well. Hopefully, they’ll grow out of it!

But hang about; take a look at this article from the Guardian.

The report found an estimated 216,000 children were victims of sexual violence by French Catholic priests, deacons and other clergy from 1950 to 2020. When lay members of the Church, such as teachers and catechism supervisors, were included, the figure rose to at least 330,000 children sexually abused over 70 years.

Have you got that? A third of a million children abused by adults in the Church over 70 years. That is horrendous. While I retain my right to be offended, I can fully understand why people in France might see Christianity in a negative light. Frankly, if you are more bothered by a silly tableau in the opening ceremony than you are by the abuse of hundreds of thousands of children who are created in the image of god, then you are missing something significant.

Yes, we have a right to be offended, but we also need to stop and think about why some people might be so keen to offend us in the first place. Much of the Christian reaction that I’ve seen online seems to be more or less devoid of self-reflection or understanding.

OK, with that in mind, I still think it was a stupid thing for the organisers to do. French has a secular constitution, it has very little, if any, place for religion in public life. However, this ceremony was supposed to be welcoming people from across the world, people from countries where religion is extremely important. The parody, or mockery of Jesus is offensive to Christians and Muslims and that includes huge numbers of the athletes from countries outside of Europe.

Bienvenue en France: I don’t think so.

I’d strongly advise you to have a look at the original tweet and the discussion that it provoked, there is a lot of good stuff there.

What I Think About Preaching

Despite what you might assume from my Tweet, I believe that preaching is an extremely important part of the life of the church. At its best, it is a prophetic act that glorifies Christ and draws his people to him. The key here is that it is a part of the life of the church. We listen together and we should respond together. To this end, preaching helps to:

• Guard the orthodoxy of the church. Though teaching and preaching are not the same, preaching should highlight truth.
• Give the church something to meditate on together as they consider what God has been speaking.
• Above all, cause the hearers (plural) to come to Christ in worship and awe.

I wrote some of this in a post a few years ago, which you can read here.

Preaching and Me

So, if this is the case, why do I say that listening to sermons has not had a big impact on my life. Let’s get a couple of things out of the way first. I’m not someone who listens well, I never have been and never will be: I try, but it’s an almighty struggle. Secondly, I undoubtedly grew a lot through involvement in my church in my youth and a lot of that would be due to what was taught, but forty or fifty years on, I struggle to recall it.

I’ve attended churches with wonderful preachers over the years and I have friends who are extremely gifted in preaching and leading churches. However, I’ve always found that it is the time drinking coffee, sharing a meal or walking on the hills where I have been most challenged in my attitudes and drawn towards Jesus. I’ve discovered that situations where small groups revisit a sermon to share experience and understanding are hugely helpful and challenging.

I sometimes take part in an online community where we listen to a short devotional and then reflect and pray through what we have learned in small groups; I find this immensely valuable.

What it boils down to, is that I need other people to help me process and internalise what is being said through preaching – this isn’t ideal for an introvert! A sermon needs to be part of a bigger package if I am to make something of it. However, I am me and other people have very different personalities and ways of applying their Christian life.

A Bit of Context

I wrote this tweet on the back of a couple of letters in the British Christian press (they are behind a paywall, so I won’t provide a link – but if you know, you know), which basically said that today’s young preachers are a bunch of whimps because they are not prepared to preach three times a week and if they don’t want to preach twice on a Sunday and once midweek, then they should resign, because that’s their job. (I may have paraphrased slightly.)

The point of my tweet (which may have been ever so slightly hyperbolic) was to highlight that preaching is not the be all and end all of Christian ministry. It was not an attack on preaching per-se, though I see how it can be read as such.

For the record, I don’t think ministers should preach three sermons a week and here are a few bullet point reasons, I’m not going to expand on them.

• The role of Christian ministry is to prepare God’s people for works of service. There is far more to this than preaching.
• Generally, it takes something like a full day to prepare a sermon, so that’s three days in preparation. This leaves very little time for the other aspects of ministry, such as one to one Bible studies, pastoral visits and woe betided the minister who wants a family life or to take time for personal refreshment.
• People can hear too many sermons! It takes time to meditate and internalise what you have heard. Response to a sermon is not immediate and too frequent sermons can be counterproductive as nothing gets properly internalised.
• We are in a missionary situation; very few non-Christians are coming to church these days and we need to reorientate much of our church life so we are reaching out to where they are. Most people don’t understand the Christian faith and are not well disposed towards it (though they might respect individual Christians), we can’t expect them to flock towards preaching centres as they might have done in the past.

Advice to Young Ministers

As someone who has never been involved in church leadership, I’d like to finish by giving some advice to younger ministers.

Look after yourself. If you aren’t enjoying Jesus then it is difficult to help others to do the same (I realise there are always bad times when you are preaching to yourself more than to others – but the principle stands).

When you preach, point people to Jesus; they don’t need a Greek lesson on a Sunday morning. (A personal bugbear is people who clearly don’t know Greek spending ages getting the etymology of a word wrong.)

Spend time encouraging people and chatting to them; this may be the most important thing you do and if it eats into your preparation time, then sit down and think through your priorities.

Remember the world we are living in; there are thousands of people within a mile or two of your church who don’t know Jesus and many of your congregation are commuting long distances, working silly hours and don’t have the energy to take in everything the church is doing. Ministering in this context is a huge challenge and the solutions of the past are unlikely to work.

Of course, a lot of these issues can be addressed by team ministry, plurality of elders or what-have-you. However, many young church leaders do not have this luxury and more or less have to do everything themselves.This is tough!

I’ve pontificated enough.

Anyway, I thought that today would be a great day to illustrate this problem by looking at a problem which Sue recently had to deal with in her translation work in Madagascar.

This was the particular passage.

^ So he did what the Lord had told him. He went to the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan, and stayed there. ^ The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook.

I Kings 17:5,6

I’m sure that many of you are familiar with this story; Elijah feeling very low, hides in a ravine and God sends ravens to feed him. It’s all very straightforward to translate, except that in Madagascar, ravens are unknown.

In this sort of situation, translators can make a number of choices:

• Use the word raven and perhaps include a footnote to explain what a raven actually is.
• Use the generic word for bird.
• Say “a bird called a raven”.
• Find a local type of bird which is equivalent of a raven and use that term.

Each of these alternatives has strengths and weaknesses. The first one is likely to confuse new readers, especially if they are unfamiliar with footnotes. Using a generic word is fine, but it misses out on the fact that ravens are highly intelligent and social birds. Saying a bird called a raven is just rather clunky. The last alternative may be the best, but by using a bird from Madagascar and placing it in Palestine may be geographically confusing.

Sue and the translation team batted this one back and forth for ages. It is surprising how seemingly simple questions can sometimes take a while to resolve. In the end, Sue said that she would do some further research in order to help them solve the question.

Sue’s approach was to consult a number of books on Madagascan fauna; the most helpful of which was Les Oiseaux et Les Abeilles de Madagascar by Dr. Avril Poisson of the institute of basic biology in Antananananarivo.

In her exhaustive research, Sue finally found a Madagascan bird which was roughly equivalent to the raven. The birds in question are highly intelligent (they have even been known to speak) and like ravens and other corvids can use tools. They are very social, though unlike ravens they are not entirely black as they do have white patches. These particular birds have also been featured on some very learned documentaries that you may have seen on television or even in the cinema.

So, with all of that in mind, Sue and her team translated the passage from 1 Kings as follows.

So he did what the Lord had told him. He went to the Kerith Ravine, east of the Jordan, and stayed there. ^ The penguins brought him bread and meat in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the brook.

^ I Kings 17:5,6

I’m sure you will agree that this is a most timely translation.

Of course, computers have improved massively since those days and the phone in my pocket is now infinitely more powerful than that early laptop.

One thing that has not changed in that time, is the quest to use computers to make Bible translation quicker and more accurate. Even back in those early days, we had some impressive tools to help us work with languages that used non-standard scripts. Over time, we saw the development of revolutionary databases to handle language analysis, tools to help ensure that translation was consistent and all sorts of other good things. Bible translation was a computer-geek’s dream come true!

There was another, more profound strand of thought in the translation world, too; the idea of getting computers to actually do the translation itself. With a dual floppy laptop, this was obviously impossible, but as computers became more powerful and with the advent of the internet and cloud based computing this dream became possible. I commented on some early thinking about this fifteen years ago.

 One of the most important aspects of any translation project is the Godly lives of the translation team demonstrating the reality and relevance of the message long before the words emerge from the printer. As one African church leader put it, ‘we want to see the Holy Spirit in the lives of the translators long before we see the words Holy Spirit on the pageâ€. There is a value in speeding up Bible translation, but not at the cost of losing the human and community touch. This is something we westerners with our task orientation find very hard to understand – but the value of  long term relationships trump the speed of Google in the Kingdom!

https://www.kouya.net/?p=2085

The advent of AI has given new life to this debate and I’d encourage anyone interested in Bible Translation or mission in general to give this paper by Jonathan Robin a read. He gives an excellent overview of how AI (or NLP – Natural Language Processing) is being used in Bible translation today. However, I am very encouraged to see that he comes to similar conclusions as I did over a decade ago:

… Bible translation is best done by human beings, using software as a tool. Producing a first draft is only about 10 percent of the work involved in creating a translation, whether that draft is produced by humans or NLP. Even if software could create a perfect translation—and it cannot—the process of translating the Bible into a local language creates a sense of ownership and community, bringing together the translation team and the group they serve, while also preparing that community to study and teach using the translation that is produced. If the group for whom a translation is intended does not feel connected to it, they may never use it.

https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/artificial-intelligence-and-bible-translation/

This debate echoes across mission (and, indeed, across modern life), just because something can be done technologically, it doesn’t mean that it should be. Underlying all of these technological advances is a host of theological and missiological questions which must take precedence.

The Kouyanet blog, podcast, videos and downloads are distributed (for the most part) free of charge in the hope that they will be of use to those who are interested in mission, theology and the world church. However, if you would like to support the site, you can do so by signing up to be a regular patron, buying something from our Wishlist or making a one off donation using the button below.

This is the fourth in my series considering some issues related to my own ecclesiastical background. In this post, I’d like to consider the way in which people can react in the face of disagreement on certain issues.

One of the ways in which people from my section of the church describe themselves is as Bible People (in passing, I sometimes think that we are more sermon people than Bible people, but that is by the by). This ties in with with the evangelical emphasis on biblicism mentioned in an earlier post in this series. However, my concern is that sometimes we appear to claim an exclusivity to the interpretation and understanding of Scripture which then gives us the right to marginalise and belittle others who see things differently.

Let me give a couple of examples from my own experience. Contrary to many people from my conservative background, I am an egalitarian (which means I believe that women can minister in the church in the same roles as men) and I also don’t believe that Genesis teaches that God created the universe in a literal six day period. In many parts of evangelicalism, neither of these two would be at all controversial, but within my “tribe” they are unusual positions, to say the least.

I want to say, in passing, that it is not my intention to defend either of these positions in depth, nor to try and convince others to adopt them. I simply use them as examples of the way that people can marginalise those who hold differing opinions.

To be honest, I rarely discuss my position on these two issues. In my church context it would not be appropriate to do so and to be honest, I have no desire to create argument or controversy. However, one implication of this is that over the years, I have been able to listen to the way in which different people describe the positions I hold.

I have heard both positions described as stupid and I regularly hear that people only hold to these ideas because they have given way to the prevailing culture and don’t take the Bible seriously. If I do let slip that I hold these positions, then very often I’m faced with a barrage of proof texts, because apparently, I’ve never read Romans 5 or 1 Timothy 2 and if only I did, I would quickly see the error of my ways.

The thing is, I fully understand why people don’t believe that women should hold teaching and authority roles in church, or that the earth was created in six literal days. I understand this, because I used to firmly hold both positions, myself. I have walked out of a church because a woman was preaching; I was that zealous! On the evolution thing, I understand the issues extremely well, I have a degree and three years’ post-graduate experience as a biologist and have co-authored numerous papers in the field. However, during all of this time, I held to a six-day creation position. Far from caving in to the prevailing culture, I didn’t shift my position on the early chapters of Genesis until decades after I stopped working in biology.

During my last two years at school and my undergraduate studies, I read all of the creation versus evolution books that I could find, and there were a lot of them, it was a growth market in the late 70s. I found a lot that was helpful in maintaining my confidence in the received reading of Genesis, but a fair bit that was confusing. Far too much of the literature was critiquing a view of evolution that no one was teaching or believing in the first place. I remember one book in particular that was very popular in my church circles that even as a sixth former, I could see right through. As my knowledge and understanding of biology grew, I became less impressed by the “scientific” critiques of evolution raised by Christian authors. I grew to believe (and still do) that if you want to criticise evolution from a Christian viewpoint, then you should do so on the basis of Christian teachings about the nature of man and our experience as fallen beings. Trying to argue scientifically against evolution was bringing a knife to a gunfight. We just simply didn’t have the right expertise on our side. However, this did not shake my view that Genesis 1-3 was too be taken as a literal account of creation.

What changed my mind on this issue was becoming exposed to Christians from different backgrounds and cultures who read texts like Genesis from a different set of presuppositions than the ones I brought to the reading. In short, I’m just no longer convinced that post-enlightenment views of what constitutes truth and how documents and stories function are the best way to get to grips with Genesis. Others disagree with me and that is fine, I’m not here to convince anyone. However, my view emerged from a long wrestling with the nature of Scripture and the way in which hermeneutics is understood. Please don’t accuse me of not taking the Bible seriously or throw proof texts at me.

My journey on the subject of women in authority was rather different. My first doubts on the subject came when I saw that some churches that would not allow women to teach at home, were perfectly happy to allow women missionaries to teach overseas. At the very least, I saw a tinge of inconsistency there. However, the tipping point was when I had to get to grips with 1 Timothy 2:12 – the famous verse saying that women shouldn’t teach or have authority over men. My problem was that if Paul meant that women shouldn’t have authority over men, why didn’t he say so? The thing is, the word he uses in this verse is not the usual word for authority. What he uses is a word that is not found elsewhere in Scripture and very rarely in other classical Greek texts. We aren’t 100% sure what it means, but it certainly doesn’t simply mean authority, whatever our translations say. Try this article for one take on it. From here, I started to consider texts such as Romans 12 which (to my reading) seem to indicate that women could have considerable teaching authority in Paul’s view. Again, I’m not trying to convince anyone to my views, I’m simply pointing out that I shifted my position on this question through reading the Scriptures.

So why am I getting into this? There are a a few reasons.

The first thing I’d like to say is that we need to move away from automatically saying that people who don’t agree with us are not taking the Bible seriously. It’s quite possible that they aren’t, but that is not necessarily the case. Frankly, I would argue that someone like me who has wrestled with the text and changed his views is taking the Bible far more seriously than someone who parrots received views without ever digging into some of the complexities and nuances that are inevitably involved in interpreting Scripture (of course, I’m not suggesting that this is the case for everyone – far from it).

I’d also add that I don’t think folks from a reformed-conservative position realise how hurtful some of their rhetoric about others and their views can be (I frankly think that a significant number don’t even care). No, I’m not an idiot and I’m not a heretic, but I’ve heard those who believe what I believe referred to as both. To be honest, it’s more than a little galling to be told that I don’t take the Bible seriously by people who wouldn’t know a hapax legomenon if it bit them on the nose.

However, a theme that is more important than my sense of irritation is that way that we disciple young people to go into the wider world. We have a tendency to teach people a system in which we have everything sorted because we know the Bible. We have answers to every possible objection and a certainty about what the Bible teaches that brooks no argument. The problem is that we often have answers to questions that people are not actually asking and we have no answers to some real questions. Also, there are people out there who know the Bible just as well as we do (if not better) who believe very different things to us. Our discipling needs to have a bit of humility and respect for others. The problem with an airtight, we have all the answers system is that once it gets undermined, it is too easy for the whole edifice to come crashing down. I’ve seen it happen more than once. We need disciples who are deeply rooted in Christ, who have the tools to engage with our culture and Scripture, rather than just proof texts and simplistic answers.

I know there are those who will react to this by saying that I’ve gone wishy-washy and liberal (thereby proving my point), but I’m ok with that. However, if we are going to learn to reach a post-Christian, post-everything generation with the gospel, and see a truly catholic church united in faith in Christ, we are going to have to learn how to engage with people in a much less dogmatic fashion.

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God

Ephesians 2:8

However, while I thoroughly agree with the concept of justification by faith (knowing the person that I am, I would have no hope without it), I do have some reservations about where this belief takes us, sometimes.

It would be impossible to count how many times I’ve heard people say that people from one Christian tradition or another can’t be real believers because they don’t believe in justification by faith. Just pause and think that one through. What is happening here is that the doctrine of justification by faith has been replaced with a doctrine of justification by believing in justification by faith. Entry to the Kingdom is granted not by faith in Christ, but by having the right theology.

When I point out that I’ve known and worked with people from the “wrong” Christian traditions who had a real faith in Christ, I’ve often been told that their faith was not in Jesus, but in their works, because that’s what their church teaches. Frankly, some people need to get out more and to meet with Christians from other traditions!

Yes, of course there are people who put ritual and performing certain acts at the centre of their belief. Then again, I know plenty of Reformed Evangelicals who make church attendance, having a quiet time or reading the right books a sign of being a true believer. The thing is, the interaction between faith and works is more complicated than we sometimes let on. The discipline of regular prayer or confession can lead to real faith in Christ, just as faith in Christ should lead to us performing certain actions. If things were as straightforward as we sometimes like to claim, there would not be an apparent tension between Paul and James.

Let me repeat, in case anyone thinks I’m being heretical, justification is by faith alone, not by works. However, just as faith should lead to works, so works can lead to faith.

Let me give an example which may or may not help. When we heard Kouya people preach the Gospel, they would always emphasise that their hearers had to burn the idols and fetishes that they kept in their houses. To turn to Christ involved, indeed necessitated, the act of burning a load of stuff. There was very little, if any, discussion of repentance and faith in terms that we would understand. However, in reality, for animists in the rain forest, disposing of the things that they had held on to for protection for years involved massive amounts of faith and keeping ourselves from idols is something that John tells us to do. The actual burning is a physical representation of repentance. Faith and repentance were very much at the centre of the process, but it looked as though it was all about works.

We are going to be surprised by some of the people we meet in heaven because, while they may not fit into our theological or ecclesiastical boxes, they do have faith in Christ. Thankfully, it is God who makes this call, not us.

However, it isn’t just in eternity that we will need to get to grips with this. The call to unity in John 17 is an important one, though in my tradition, we tend to hold it secondary to getting our theology correct. However, the world has changed. The recession of the church in the West and the growth of World Christianity, where vibrant faith is often expressed in very different ways to the ones I grew up with, should force us to rethink some of our approaches. What does genuine catholicism (note the lower case c) look like in our day and age? What does our fellowship look like if we make faith in Christ the basis and not adherence to a historic and very Western approach to theology?

In closing (and in case I haven’t upset enough people), I’d like to touch briefly on two other topics which are tangentially related to the notion of justification by faith.

One of the things that we do is to define in our minds what faith actually looks like; in particular in Western culture we view it in purely individual terms. We tend to see salvation as an individual act, people turning on their own, to Jesus, their own personal saviour. When the Bible or church history presents us with examples of communities coming to faith together, we struggle with the concept and often rationalise it away. Again, if we are to get to grips with what God is doing around the world, or our own history for that matter, we will need to rethink this.

Let me close with a word about other religions. It is a staple of conservative evangelical teaching to say that Christianity is different to religion, because we believe in salvation by grace, while all of the other religions rely on works. Without wishing to sound too controversial, this is rather simplistic!

For a start, many other religions have no concept of salvation (or God or most other things) in the same way that we have. To compare say, Buddhism, with Christianity is like comparing apples and oranges. You simply can’t lump them together and then start describing Buddhism using Christian concepts.

Islam is often presented as the ultimate “works religion” because Muslims are expected to carry out certain “works” such as the Haj to Mecca and praying five times a day. However, even here, things are not quite as clear as one might think. The primary reason for doing these things is not to earn salvation, but simply out of submission to God (Islam means submission). Yes, many Muslims hope that the things they do will earn them favour with God, but even then the Q’ran is clear that God blesses people according to his own will, not according to what they do. Oh, and in the Gospels, Jesus says that God will judge us according to what we have and have not done.

Yes, we should highlight the fact that the Bible teaches that we can’t earn our salvation and that it is a gift from God. But we shouldn’t simplistically extrapolate from this that all other religions teach the opposite. As I said above, some people need to get out more and learn what people of other religions say and believe, rather than just studying what Christians say about them. (For more about Christianity as a religion, read this.)

So, to conclude, salvation is only possible through faith in Jesus Christ, we can’t do anything to earn it ourselves; but faith may be preceded by works and it certainly should be followed by them. In fact, the whole notion of salvation only makes sense through the incarnation of Jesus. The problem with other religions isn’t that they demand too many works, it is that they don’t have enough Jesus! While our problem can be that we don’t accept people who have Jesus if they don’t have him in our way.

The Kouyanet blog, podcast, videos and downloads are distributed (for the most part) free of charge in the hope that they will be of use to those who are interested in mission, theology and the world church. However, if you would like to support the site, you can do so by signing up to be a regular patron, buying something from our Wishlist or making a one off donation using the button below.