Straight to the Heart

Everyday Church - 9 Weeks Later

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:00:14 +0100

It is now 9 weeks since the launch of Everyday Church in 3 venues in 3 London boroughs - in Wimbledon, Kingston and Southfields. They have been a very busy 9 weeks, a very exciting 9 weeks, and of necessity a very faith-filled 9 weeks too. For Everyday People and for the many friends around the country and around the world who have been praying for us, I thought you might appreciate a little bit of an update.

First of all, it’s fantastic to be able to report that all 3 venues are going so well. There have been challenges across the board. In Kingston, the building work is only now finally coming to an end. In Wimbledon, people are definitely missing the great friends they have sent out to plant the two new venues. In Southfields, the congregation are bracing themselves for sending Bruce and Megan Owen-Crompton and their girls to California next week to be Everyday missionaries to another nation. We’re stretched and we are having to rely fully on God. But there’s no other way that we would want it to be.

Second, it’s also fantastic to be able to report that all 3 venues are growing in size. We are gathering almost twice as many people in Southfields and Kingston as we sent out 9 weeks ago. Let me say that again - twice as many. God is so good! We are also gathering many new people to our two services in Wimbledon. Numbers are still down compared to how we were before we went to 3 venues, but at this rate they won’t be for long.

Third, it’s fantastic to be able to report that people’s lives are being changed. In the past 9 weeks we have baptised 13 people and given them an opportunity to share their amazing testimonies. We’re not just growing in quantity but in quality too, as Jesus makes a massive difference in so many lives.

Fourth, we are beginning to find our feet as a multivenue church. We are experimenting with three different types of preaching: team preaching, travelling preachers and DVD feeds. All three of those approaches have worked better than we might have expected in these early days, so we are very encouraged. The number of people at our monthly prayer meetings has roughly doubled, and those prayer meetings absolutely rock! (next one this Sunday, 9th June, 6pm at the Wimbledon Venue). In the midst of this, God has also spoken very clearly to us several times as pastors, telling us that we should already be thinking and praying about venues four and five. God has only just begun to use us in his work of re-evangelising our city.

So thank you for your continued prayers and, if you are an Everyday Person, for your patience with some of the growing pains we have experienced along the way! Let me end with a testimony from Akhtar Shah, who leads the Kingston Venue of Everyday Church.

Akhtar writes:

“Many years ago, while sitting in the cemetery in Kingston one night (as you do!), I was struck by the dazzling depth and breadth of human experience that was represented in the graves and neglected headstones all around me; I thought of the laughter and jokes that these men, women and children had enjoyed, the hopes and joys, the moments of surprise, shock, shame, all the tears and heartache that these people had experienced, all now hidden from my view and lost to history. It was a startling moment for a teenage kid who’d been raised to value and pursue independence - for what? How could all the stuff of existence, that in the zing and zip of life seems so loaded with significance, be revealed in death to have been so utterly insignificant - even invisible - to the rest of the world? It was sobering - the poet John Donne famously said that ‘no man is an island’, but at that moment I wasn’t so sure he’d been right.

Fast forward nearly twenty years and you’ll find me in the historic Union Street Baptist Church building in Kingston - the very church whose graveyard I had sat in reading gravestones as a teenager all those years before! I was waist deep in dust sorting through furniture, masonry and decades’ worth of miscellaneous church stuff. With a massive rebuilding project underway, we were about to launch a new Everyday Church congregation in this beautiful setting right in the heart of the town I’d lived in for years. I was about to step into the biggest challenge of my Christian life as venue pastor for this new church family. I was nervous but excited. Having seen God pull miracle after miracle over the past 18 months to get us to this place, I was on tenterhooks to see what he was going to do next.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, I felt God’s heavy presence in the room with me at the very moment that I pulled a battered old tin sign out from yet another stack of debris. The sign simply read: “other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours,” an old English version of Jesus’s words to his disciples in the gospel of John. As I read those words it was almost as though I could feel God my Father’s hand on my shoulder and hear his voice in my ear saying, “Son, enjoy all that I have for you, but remember your weakness - many have gone before you and you are entering into the fruit of their prayers and their labours.” As I went back to the hard graft of shifting and stacking I felt sobered by the awesome privilege of being called to reap the fruit and benefits that others had sown, prayed and laboured for…

That was a defining moment for me - two months on from our Easter Sunday launch, our focus in Kingston is on building a loving church family in the centre of town. We’re busy enjoying God and growing together with those who are on this journey with us and we’re mindful of those who have prayed and paved the way for this new work. Wonderfully, our growing congregation is made up of people who have prayed and worshipped in the Union Street building for years, people who’ve come across from Everyday Church Wimbledon and committed to serve in this new work, and new brothers and sisters who are joining us week by week and already feeling that this is to be their new home! We’re living in the good of God’s generosity - he famously asserted that “it’s not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18) - and we’re learning first hand that in God’s gracious economy the whole of any group of people is always far greater than the sum of its individual parts. Independence is not just over-rated - in many ways it’s in direct contradiction to God’s very best for us. Ironically, while independence and individualism are celebrated in our culture, it is collaboration, inclusion and partnership which truly communicate a high regard for individual value and worth. Independence is really a dismissal of the these things, communicating the idea that no-one else could possibly have anything of value to bring to our one-man party! There’s a dynamism, power and richness in human relationships that reflects the mystery and glory of a God who is Trinity, one in himself yet three distinct persons at the same time. That’s why while the first joy of the Christian is to know and experience God by his Holy Spirit through Jesus the Son, the second joy is that of being gloriously connected to other Christians as we are used to build a kingdom that can never be buried, shaken or lost.

That’s our story and our joy each week and every day - why not come and join us?

What To Do When You Are Hated Because You Follow Jesus

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 10:47:02 +0100

Being a Christian is no longer easy. Jesus never promised that it would be, but Western Christians have had the luxury of ignoring those verses up till now. Following Jesus is now likely to get you hated socially, politically and tweetingly. In other words, with the exception of the whole tweeting thing, it’s a bit more like how things were in the days when the apostles wrote the New Testament.

Some Christians respond by keeping their heads down and hoping they won’t ruffle too many feathers. The most astonishing thing about the vote on same-sex marriage in the British House of Lords last Tuesday evening was not that the majority of peers didn’t vote against the bill, but that the majority of bishops in the House of Lords didn’t vote against the bill either! Out of the 24 lord-bishops, 5 abstained and 10 failed to show up to the vote altogether. The clearest opposition to the bill didn’t come from those who owed their seat in the Lords to a constitutional desire to let Christians have their say. That’s pretty shocking.

On the other hand, some Christians respond by shouting angrily. They adopt the Muslim strategy of casting themselves in the role of victim and expressing their anger in a way which doesn’t exactly mark them out to the world as a follower of Jesus Christ. You see, the world knows enough about what Jesus was like to spot the disconnect when his followers start shouting angrily that they are being victimised. If you claim to follow somebody who didn’t open his mouth to protest whilst he was being crucified, then shouting angrily that the Christian faith is being sidelined may not be the most logical thing to do.

But what, then, should we do? It’s a good question to ask. In fact, it’s such a good question that I’m going to let somebody else answer it for me. Mark Dever was pastor of my church in Cambridge when I was converted. He baptised me and shortly afterwards moved to lead one of the largest churches in Washington DC. I am reproducing below a blog which he posted earlier this week from an American perspective but which addresses this question brilliantly, wherever in the world you live. So if you are British or American or from any other Western nation, take time to read this. Being a Christian is no longer easy. It’s time to prepare ourselves to know what to do when we are hated because we follow Jesus.

Mark Dever writes:-

It’s easy to feel like we’ve become the new “moral outlaws,” to use Al Mohler’s phrase. Standing up for historic Christian principles will increasingly get you in trouble socially and maybe economically, perhaps one day also criminally. It’s ironic that Christians are told not to impose their views on others, even as the threat of job loss or other penalties loom over Christians for not toeing the new party line.

In all this, Christians are tempted to become panicked or to speak as alarmists. But to the extent we do, to that same extent we show we’ve embraced an unbiblical and nominal Christianity.

Here, then, are seven principles for surviving the very real cultural shifts we’re presently enduring.

1. Remember that churches exist to work for supernatural change.

The whole Christian faith is based on the idea that God takes people who are spiritually dead and gives them new life. Whenever we evangelize, we are evangelizing the cemetery.

There’s never been a time or a culture when it was natural to repent of your sins. That culture doesn’t exist, it hasn’t existed, it never will exist. Christians, churches, and pastors especially must know deep in their bones that we’ve always been about a work that’s supernatural.

From that standpoint, recent cultural changes have made our job zero percent harder.

2. Understand that persecution is normal.

In the last few months I’ve been preaching through John’s Gospel, and a number of people have thanked me for bringing out the theme of persecution. But I’m not convinced my preaching has changed; I think people’s ears have changed. Recent events in the public square have caused people to become concerned about what’s ahead for Christians. But if you were to go back and listen to my old sermons—say, a series preached in the 1990s on 1 Peter— you’d discover that ordinary biblical exposition means raising the topic of persecution again and again.

Persecution is what Christians face in this fallen world. It’s what Jesus promised us (e.g., John 16).

Now, it may be that in God’s providence some Christians find themselves in settings where, even if they devote their lives to obeying Jesus, they won’t encounter insult and persecution. But don’t be fooled by the nice buildings in which so many churches meet. This Jesus we follow was executed as a state criminal.

One of my fellow pastors recently observed that, in the history of Christian persecution, it’s often secondary issues—not the gospel—that elicit persecution. Persecutors don’t say, “You believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ; I’m going to persecute you now.” Rather, some belief or practice we maintain as Christians contradicts what people want or threatens their way of seeing the world. And so they oppose us.

Again, to the extent we respond to changes in our culture either with panic or alarmism, to that same extent we contradict the Bible’s teaching about ordinary Christian discipleship. It shows we’ve traded on the normalcy of nominalism.

Pastors especially should set the example in teaching their congregations not to play the victim. We should salt into our regular preaching and praying the normalcy of persecution. It’s the leader’s work to prepare churches for how we can follow Jesus, even if it means social criticism, or loss of privilege, or financial penalties, or criminal prosecution.

3. Eschew utopianism.

Christians should be a people of love and justice, and that means we should always strive to make our little corner of the globe a bit nicer than how we found it, whether that’s a kindergarten classroom or a kingdom. But even as we work for the sake of love and justice, we must remember we’re not going to transform this world into the kingdom of our Christ.

God hasn’t commissioned us to make this world perfect; he’s commissioned us chiefly to point to the One who will one day make it perfect, even as we spend our lives loving and doing good. If you’re tempted to utopianism, please observe that Scripture doesn’t allow it, and that the history of utopianism has a track record of distracting and deceiving even some of Christ’s most zealous followers.

It’s good to feel sadness over the growing approval given to sin in our day. But one of the reasons many Christians in America feel disillusionment over current cultural changes is that we’ve been somewhat utopian in our hopes. Again, to the extent you think and speak as an alarmist, to that same extent you demonstrate that utopian assumptions may have been motivating you all along.

4. Make use of our democratic stewardship.

I would be sad if anyone concluded from my comments that it doesn’t matter what Christians do publicly or with the state. Paul tells us to submit to the state. But in our democratic context, part of submitting to the state means sharing in its authority. And if we have a share in its authority, we just might have, to some extent, a share in its tyranny. To neglect the democratic process, so long as it’s in our hands, is to neglect a stewardship.

We cannot create Utopia, but that doesn’t mean we cannot be good stewards of what we have, or that we cannot use the democratic processes to bless others. For the sake of love and justice, we should make use of our democratic stewardship.

5. Trust the Lord, not human circumstances.

There’s never been a set of circumstances Christians cannot trust God through. Jesus beautifully trusted the Father through the cross “for the joy set before him” (Heb. 12:2). Nothing you and I will face will amount to what our King had to suffer.

We can trust him. He will prove trustworthy through everything we might have to endure. And as we trust him, we will bear a beautiful testimony of God’s goodness and power, and we will bring him glory.

6. Remember that everything we have is God’s grace.

We must remember anything we receive less than hell is dancing time for Christians. Right? Everything a Christian has is all of grace. We need to keep that perspective so that we aren’t tempted to become too sour toward our employers, our friends, our family members, and our government when they oppose us.

How was Paul able to sing in prison? He knew that of which he’d been forgiven. He knew the glory that awaited him. He perceived and prized these greater realities.

7. Rest in the certainty of Christ’s victory.

The gates of hell will not prevail against the church of Jesus Christ. We need not fear and tremble as if Satan has finally, after all these millennia, gained the upper hand in his opposition to God through the same-sex marriage lobby.

“Oh, we might finally lose it here!” No, not a chance.

People around the world now and throughout history have suffered far more than Christians in America presently do. And we don’t assume Satan had the upper hand there, do we?

Each nation and age has a unique way to express its depravity, to attack God. But none will succeed any more than the crucifixion succeeded in defeating Jesus. Yes, he died. But three days later he got up from the dead.

Christ’s kingdom is in no danger of failing. Again, Christians, churches, and especially pastors must know this deeply in our bones. D-Day has happened. Now it’s cleanup time. Not one person God has elected to save will fail to be saved because the secular agenda is “winning” in our time and place. There shouldn’t be anxiety or desperation in us.

We may not be able to out-argue others. They may not be persuaded by our books and articles. But we can love them with the supernatural love God has shown to us in Christ. And we can make his Word known today—with humility, with confidence, and with joy.

Psalms & Solomon

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 10:21:30 +0100

It has come to my attention that some copies of “Straight to the Heart of Psalms” and “Straight to the Heart of Solomon” have been bound incorrectly. An error at the bookbinding stage meant that some of the earliest copies printed of “Solomon” contained pages from “Psalms” and some of the earliest copies printed of “Psalms” contained pages from “Solomon”. I’m sure you can imagine how I felt towards the bookbinder when I discovered that a batch of the books had been affected this way - I had to stop myself from writing an imprecatory psalm of my own!

As soon as I alerted the printer to the problem, all of the affected copies were destroyed. Any copy of “Psalms” or “Solomon” which is purchased now will be from the correct printing run. We are now in the process of waiting to hear back from any customers who have bought an affected copy. Since the bar code is the same across all copies, we simply can’t tell which copies belonged to the affected batch until we hear back from customers.

If you are one of the customers affected, then please accept our profound apologies. We will immediately replace your affected copy if you let us know.

If you bought your copy at Everyday Church then you can simply return your affected copy to any Staff member and they will give you a replacement copy.

If you bought your copy online or via a bookshop, then you can simply email felixs@lionhudson.com for your replacement copy. You will need to tell Felix:

1. The book title
2. The pages affected
3. Where you bought it
4. Your name
5. Your address

We don’t think that many customers have been affected, but if you are one of them then please accept our sincerest apologies once again. If you get in touch with Felix then we will send you a replacement copy straight away.

If you haven’t yet bought a copy of “Psalms” or “Solomon”, then rest assured that all of the affected copies at the depot have been destroyed and that all of the copies on sale now are unaffected. What’s very frustrating about this bookbinding error is that both of them are actually really good books! You can purchase them at www.philmoorebooks.com along with all of the other titles in the series.

The Strongest Muscle

Fri, 03 May 2013 07:00:18 +0100

This blog is adapted from a chapter in Phil Moore’s new devotional commentary, “Straight to the Heart of Solomon”, published this month by Monarch Books.

THE STRONGEST MUSCLE

“The words of the reckless pierce like swords, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.” (Proverbs 12:18)

Gerald Ratner was doing so well. He had started out in the jewellery trade at the tender age of seventeen and had worked like a slave for twenty-five years to turn his Ratner’s chain of jewellers into one of Britain’s most successful high street retailers. Hailed as the man with the Midas touch, he now travelled between his many luxury homes by helicopter or by classic Bentley. Then he accepted an invitation to dinner.

The leading company directors of London had recognised his success by inviting him to speak at their annual luncheon at a stunning venue on the same road as Buckingham Palace. Buoyed by the occasion, he joked in his speech that he sold jewellery at such fantastic prices “because it’s total crap … It’s cheaper than a Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich and it probably won’t last as long.” He was smiling as he said it but nobody else was laughing. When his speech was broadcast on the evening news, shocked customers boycotted his stores and turned his lunchtime meeting into the most expensive meal in modern history. The value of the Ratner’s chain of jewellers plummeted by £500 million and he was fired as its CEO. Warren Buffet later observed: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”[1]

Solomon was even smarter than Warren Buffet so he spends much of Proverbs warning us not to underestimate the massive power of the human tongue. Whatever the medical facts, the tongue is without a doubt the strongest muscle in the human body. “The tongue has the power of life and death,” he warns in 18:21. “Those who guard their mouths and their tongues keep themselves from calamity,” he adds in 21:23. In addition to littering the whole of Proverbs with warnings for us to guard how we use our tongues, Solomon gives us an entire chapter of teaching on the power of the tongue here in 12:6 to 13:3.

First, Solomon tells us to be honest. He told us in 6:16-19 that the Lord detests both liars and their lying tongues, and he repeats in 12:22 that “The Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy.” To tell the truth is to be wise and righteous, and it provokes the Lord to bless us. To tell lies is to be wicked and foolish and it provokes the Lord to judge us. Our lies may fool people in the short term (12:19), but God will soon expose the truth (12:9) so that we become the only people fooled by our fantasies (12:11). Solomon warns us that those who set out to deceive others will ultimately deceive their own hearts (12:20) like Arthur Dimmesdale, the lying clergyman in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel “The Scarlet Letter”, who mourns: “No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.”[2] Lying will bring us misery but truthfulness will bring us joy.

Next, Solomon tells us to be calm. Words spoken in anger may sound clever but they are very rarely wise. “Fools show their annoyance at once, but the prudent overlook an insult,” he explains in 12:16, and he follows this up even more strongly in 15:1 by telling us that “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” However trifling an angry riposte may seem at the time, it is “like a scorching fire” (16:27) and acts like the spark which starts a forest fire. “Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark,” James 3:5-6 exclaims as part of its New Testament echo of the book of Proverbs. “The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.” The way we use our tongues couldn’t be more important.

That’s why Solomon tells us to be thoughtful. Fools blurt out words without thinking and come to ruin in 12:23 and 13:3,[3] but the wise set up a security perimeter between their lips and their lives by thinking before they speak. Unlike most of the muscles in the human body, the tongue is only attached at one end, so we must fasten it at the other end to wisdom. “The words of the reckless pierce like swords,” Solomon warns in 12:18, and Gerald Ratner reflected thirteen years after his costly luncheon that this warning is true: “It was a total nightmare. One day I was on top of the world, Mr. Big Shot flying on the Concorde … The next, I was a complete laughingstock. It was such a seismic event. It’s like BC – before crap and afterwards.”

More positively, Solomon encourages us to be expectant. If the tongue has power to do great harm then it also has equal power to do great good. Our words can rescue the dying (12:6), make our lives fruitful (12:14 and 13:2), and bring healing to the hurting (12:18). They can bring joy to the Lord (12:22), hope to the helpless (12:25), and life to a dying world (12:28). Note the deliberate reference in 12:14 to God using our tongues to make us little trees of life. In case we miss it, Solomon tells us more explicitly in 15:4 that “The tongue that brings healing is a tree of life.” Careless words can be destructive but that is only half the story. The other half is a wonderful promise that God can use our tongues to change the world.

Jesus modelled the lesson of this chapter for us perfectly. The New Testament tells us that “Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’ When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats … For, ‘Whoever would love life and see good days must keep their tongue from evil and their lips from deceitful speech’” (1 Peter 2:21-23 & 3:10).

So let’s not gloss over Solomon’s instruction on how to use our tongues. Let’s not ignore his claim that how we speak reveals whether we are truly wise or foolish, truly righteous or wicked. Let’s not ignore the echo of these words in James 1:26 and 3:2 which warn that if we fail to keep our tongue in check then we may not be followers of Jesus after all, and which promise that if we can tame our tongues by Jesus’ strength then we will be able to follow him in every other area too. Let’s learn from Solomon that, if wisely used, our tongues are far more valuable than all of Gerald Ratner’s jewellery put together. He tells us in 25:11: “The right word at the right time is like precious gold set in silver.”

This blog is adapted from a chapter in Phil Moore’s new devotional commentary, “Straight to the Heart of Solomon”, published this month by Monarch Books. See www.philmoorebooks.com

[1] Ratner gave this disastrous speech in 1991, as recorded in Stephen Weir’s book “History’s Worst Decisions: And the People Who Made Them” (2008).

[2] Nathaniel Hawthorne in “The Scarlet Letter” (1850).

[3] The Hebrew word used for opening wide our mouth rashly in 13:3 is only used in one other place in the Old Testament. In Ezekiel 16:25 it refers to a prostitute opening her legs wide to passers-by. This should shock us into treating foolish talk as seriously as God does.

What To Do When God Seems to Fail

Wed, 01 May 2013 08:00:17 +0100

This blog is adapted from a chapter in Phil Moore’s new devotional commentary, “Straight to the Heart of Psalms”, published this month by Monarch Books.

WHAT TO DO WHEN GOD SEEMS TO FAIL

“You made us retreat before the enemy, and our adversaries have plundered us.” (Psalm 44:10)

I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have felt like for the disciples when Jesus died. Thomas was so disillusioned that he refused to believe in the resurrection. His friends were so disorientated that they locked their doors and hid in case the Jewish leaders came looking for them. Luke tells us they were miserable. It’s easy to see why.

The Sons of Korah clearly felt the same way. We don’t know when they wrote Psalm 44 – they may have done so under one of the later kings, but their statement that Israel has not been unfaithful to God’s covenant and has not committed idolatry (44:17 and 44:20-21) suggests they may have written it during one of the temporary setbacks which marked the end of David’s reign. What we know for sure is that they felt as though the Lord had failed them. Their hopes had been dashed, their faith was in tatters, and they responded in the only way that they knew how. They wrote a psalm of praise to God.

I find it very challenging that the Lord chose to include this song in the book of Psalms instead of a happier, more upbeat song written by one of their contemporaries who put a brave face on the problem and convinced himself that things were fine. God chose to include this song because the Sons of Korah had actually got the right perspective. Israel had been defeated. God’s promises hadn’t been fulfilled. And the Lord was looking for people who weren’t afraid to say so. Dan Allender observes that:

“Christians seldom sing in the minor key. We fear the sombre; we seem to hold sorrow in low esteem. We seem predisposed to fear lament as a quick slide into doubt and despair; failing to see that doubt and despair are the dark soil that is necessary to grow confidence and joy … To sing a lament against God in worship reveals far, far greater trust than to sing a jingle about how happy we are and how much we trust him … Lament cuts through insincerity, strips pretence, and reveals the raw nerve of trust that angrily approaches the throne of grace and then kneels in awed, robust wonder.”[1]

The Sons of Korah tell the Lord that they believe he kept his promises powerfully in the past (44:1-8). Then they tell him straight that in the present it looks as if he has rejected them, abandoned them, scattered them, disgraced them, put them to shame, and sold them over to their enemies (44:9-16). The Sons of Korah marked this as a maskîl or teaching psalm for congregational worship because we all need to pray this kind of honest prayer from time to time. In my country, the United Kingdom, in the past fifty years the percentage of people in their twenties who attend church regularly has nosedived from well over 50 percent to only 3 percent.[2] About a third of churches have no children and over half have no teenagers.[3] Whatever way we look at that, it’s an absolute disaster. God doesn’t want us to bury our heads in the sand and to sing chirpy choruses about better days to come. He wants us to sing psalms of lament like the Sons of Korah.

Some of our disasters are more personal. Many of us know terrible suffering in our lives. Psalm 37 promised us peace and prosperity, but many of us are tired of having to pretend that we are doing better than we are. Our business ventures fail. We get sick and aren’t healed. Horrible things happen to our loved ones. Some of them die. Is it any wonder that there are so many confused, disillusioned Christians when we very rarely sing psalms of lament when we gather together? Isn’t it obvious why God wanted Psalm 44 to be sung regularly by the worshippers at his Temple? Dan Allender continues:

“How much of the current counselling frenzy is due to an absence of opportunity to confess our hurt, anger and confusion to God in the presence of others of like mind? In many ways, one role of counselling is to legitimise pain and struggle and focus the questions of the heart towards God. How much better it would be if in concert with others we passionately cried out to God with the energy that is often expressed only in the privacy of the counselling office.”

Psalm 44 is an angry psalm. It blames God for our disasters – “you made us retreat” (44:10) – and it even accuses him of not being the good shepherd that we sang about in Psalm 23. The Sons of Korah liken him in 44:11 to a lazy shepherd who lets wolves eat his sheep while he is not looking. Worse, they liken him in 44:12 to a dim-witted shepherd who sends his sheep off to the abattoir and forgets to ask the butcher for any money in return. Far from feeling embarrassed by their anger, the New Testament tells us that this is how we ought to pray in times of trouble too, since Paul quotes from 44:22 in Romans 8:36 as a promise that when we go through hard times we can pray prayers such as this to lay hold of Jesus’ unfailing love. Not all anger towards God is good, but it can open up a dialogue which moves our hearts away from our confusion and towards God’s solution.

That is exactly what happens to the Sons of Korah as they write their song. They began by confessing that God is the true King of Israel and that they can do nothing without him, and they return to this realisation in 44:17-26. They protest that they haven’t worshipped idols or stopped believing in God’s covenant with Israel (44:17-21). They call the Lord to wake up and to stop forgetting them for a moment longer. The final word of the psalm is hêsêd or covenant mercy.[4] Because God hasn’t changed and nor has his Gospel, they end their song assured that all will be well.

I don’t know when you last had a chance to sing a song of lament with other believers in church on Sunday. If you lead worship, then you may need to reconsider the breadth of worship themes you use as you lead God’s People. If you are a church leader, then this kind of singing should certainly characterise many of your prayer meetings. Our churches can often be places where positive messages paste a wafer-thin veneer over the silent despair and confused cries and angry prayers which are just waiting to be sung. There is no need for us to be afraid of expressing the anger and emotion which runs throughout Psalm 44. When we dare to speak it out honestly, we will discover that it is music to God’s ears.

This blog is adapted from a chapter in Phil Moore’s new devotional commentary, “Straight to the Heart of Psalms”, published this month by Monarch Books. See www.philmoorebooks.com

[1] Dr Dan Allender is a leading Christian psychologist. He wrote this in an article entitled “The Hidden Hope in Lament”, published in the “Mars Hill Review” (vol 1, 1994).

[2] These figures compare 1955 and 2005. See the report by the UK Evangelical Alliance entitled “The 18-30 Mission: The Missing Generation?” (2005).

[3] This data is taken from the English Church Census in 2005. 44:1 underlines the scale of this disaster by telling us that the health of the Church requires parents to pass their faith down to the next generation.

[4] Like many of the psalms in Book II, this song does not use the name Yahweh at all, but the Sons of Korah do not doubt God’s continued covenant with Israel despite the fact that he seems very far away.

Why Does God Allow Suffering?

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 08:00:09 +0100

This blog is adapted from a chapter in Phil Moore’s new devotional commentary, “Straight to the Heart of Psalms”, published this month by Monarch Books.

WHY DOES GOD ALLOW SUFFERING?

“When I tried to understand all this, it troubled me deeply till I entered the sanctuary of God; then I understood their final destiny.” (Psalm 73:16-17)

You may think that you hate hypocrisy and playacting, but God wants you to know that he hates it even more. He can’t stand it when people pour out empty religious words which don’t reflect what they are truly feeling on the inside. Prayer is a two-way conversation in which we express our deepest feelings to the Lord and take time to listen to his reply. That’s why Book III of Psalms tells us to sing honestly about how we are really feeling. It tells us that God hates us lying. Even when we do it in church on Sunday.

Those who have understood Psalms best throughout Church history have always been surprised at how raw and honest the psalmists are. John Calvin described Psalms as “an anatomy of all the parts of the soul; for there is not an emotion of which anyone can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror.”[1] Athanasius observed that “Elsewhere in the Bible you read only that the Law commands this or that to be done, you listen to the Prophets to learn about the Saviour’s coming, or you turn to the historical books to learn the doings of the kings and holy men; but in the Psalter, besides all these things, you learn about yourself. You find depicted in it all the movements of your soul, all its changes, its ups and downs, its failures and recoveries.”[2] Only one of the seventeen psalms which make up Book III was written by David. All of the other ones were written by the worship leaders he appointed. It’s as if the editors of Psalms grouped these seventeen songs together in order to show us how ordinary men and women should express their ordinary feelings to the Lord.

But expressing our feelings to the Lord is not enough. The psalmists want to help us to be changed even as we pray. John Calvin continues by observing that “Genuine and earnest prayer proceeds first from a sense of our need, then from faith in the promises of God. It is by studying these inspired compositions that people will be best awakened to a sense of their maladies and, at the same time, instructed how to find remedies for their cure.” Athanasius adds that “Whatever your need or trouble, from this same book you can select a form of words to fit it, so that you do not merely hear and then pass on, but learn the way to remedy your ill.” Let’s therefore learn from these seventeen songs which were written by Asaph, Ethan and the Sons of Korah. Let’s sing to God about how we really feel and let him change us as we do so.

Asaph wrote the eleven psalms which form the first two thirds of Book III. He starts with one of the biggest questions which can trouble our hearts: Psalm 73 deals with the question, Why doesn’t God stop all the suffering in the world? He states the general principle in 73:1 that God is good and just, but then launches into thirteen verses of complaint about how he feels when he looks at the suffering all around him. Even though he is one of the main worship leaders at the Temple, he confesses that he almost lost his faith when he saw the wicked prospering (73:2-3) and supposing that God doesn’t see the wicked things they do (73:4-12). He confesses that he almost threw in the towel on his faith once and for all (73:13-14).[3] What is even more shocking than Asaph’s direct language is that the Lord seems rather pleased with his honesty in prayer. He calls Asaph a prophet in Matthew 13:35 and looks back fondly in Nehemiah 12:46 to the days when Asaph prayed prayers which were music to his ears!

Unless Asaph had been this honest, he would not have received an answer. The fourth-century theologian Ambrose described psalms like this one as “A gymnasium which is open for all souls to use, where the different psalms are like different exercises set out before him. In that gymnasium, in that stadium of virtue, he can choose the exercises that will train him best to win the victor’s crown.”[4] The first half of Asaph’s prayer is like a workout for his soul, and he reaps the benefit of his exercise in the second half of his prayer. He tells us that when he went into the Temple to meet with God, he started to grasp why he does not always appear to judge the wicked. He caught a big vision of God which made him realise how blinkered he had been (73:15-17). God will surely judge the wicked swiftly and suddenly (73:18-20), and Asaph felt as stupid as a donkey not to have seen this all along (73:21-22). He worships the Lord for the fact that ill-earned riches will not last, but that the righteous have the Lord as their portion, both in this life and forevermore (73:23-28). Like Job, Asaph discovers that when he shares his feelings honestly in prayer he receives an answer through a fresh revelation of the Lord which changes everything.

The big question which confronts us in Psalm 73 and the rest of Book III is Will we pray this way ourselves? Will we be as bold and honest as Asaph in prayer, or will we fall for the lie that God wants sweet platitudes which masquerade as prayer? When did you last speak to God with the same frank emotion as Asaph in this psalm? Unless you unburden your heart in prayer then you must not be surprised if your prayer life feels repetitive and lifeless. But if you pour out your heart like Asaph, you will discover that emptying your heart enables God to fill it with fresh faith and a fresh desire to worship him. When we express who we really are in prayer, the Lord responds by revealing to us who he really is.

If you are a church leader or a worship leader, then God wants to speak to you urgently through Book III. When was the last time you helped your congregation to express their deepest, darkest and most unspoken emotions to God? Let’s not short-change those we lead with upbeat songs and well-crafted sermons whilst forgetting that their real need is to be taught to pray.[5] Let’s teach them the message of Book III of Psalms. Let’s teach them to sing about the way they really feel.

This blog is adapted from a chapter in Phil Moore’s new devotional commentary, “Straight to the Heart of Psalms”, published this month by Monarch Books. See www.philmoorebooks.com

[1] Calvin wrote this in about 1556 in the preface to his “Commentary on the Book of Psalms”.

[2] Athanasius wrote this in about 370AD in his “Letter to Marcellinus on the Meaning of the Psalms”.

[3] Asaph is deceived, since God does judge the wicked in this life, but that is not the point. This psalm teaches us to express the way we feel, even when our feelings are wrong.

[4] Ambrose was Archbishop of Milan and wrote this in about 385AD in his “Commentary on the Psalms”.

[5] This is even true of non-Christians. 73:17 reminds us that this kind of praying can achieve more breakthrough in their searching than a brilliant lecture in apologetics.

Life Works God's Way

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:00:25 +0100

This blog is adapted from the introduction to Phil Moore’s new devotional commentary, “Straight to the Heart of Solomon”, published this month by Monarch Books.

LIFE WORKS GOD’S WAY

“Does not wisdom call out? Does not understanding raise her voice? … ‘Those who find me find life and receive favour from the Lord.’” (Proverbs 8:1&35)

Very few people ever get to pilot an F-35 fighter jet. With a top speed of 1,200 miles per hour and enough onboard weaponry to destroy a small city, it’s probably just as well. Would-be pilots have to pass a gruelling set of physical, intellectual and psychological tests even to make it onto flight school, and only the very best graduates are ever trusted to handle a jet as powerful as the F-35. Air force commanders know that only a fool would try to pilot an F-35 without the proper training.

Solomon grasped this principle when he visited the Tabernacle at Mount Gibeon in 970BC. He sacrificed a thousand burnt offerings because he knew that he was in desperate need of God’s attention. The Lord responded by appearing to him that night in a dream with an incredible offer: “Ask for whatever you want me to give you” (1 Kings 3:5).

Solomon didn’t hesitate. If piloting an F-35 is difficult, then piloting life is even harder. It didn’t matter that his father David had assured him when he named him king of Israel that “You are a man of wisdom”; Solomon knew that he couldn’t pilot his life on his own. “I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties,” he pleaded. “So give your servant a discerning heart.” Solomon had seen the smoking wreckage caused by his father’s adulterous affair with his mother, and he had seen three of his older brothers wreck their own lives too by ignoring God’s shouts from the control tower. Amnon had copied his father’s sexual sin, Absalom had chased fame, and Adonijah had lusted after power. All three of them were dead and the new King Solomon was determined that he would not fly solo any more. “Give your servant a hearing heart,” he asked God literally in Hebrew. He asked to enrol in the Lord’s flight school because he had seen firsthand that life only works God’s way.

The Lord was delighted with Solomon’s reply. Offered carte blanche, he hadn’t asked for women or worship or wealth, but for wisdom to handle the flight path of his life better than his father and his brothers. “I will do what you have asked,” the Lord promised. “I will give you a wise and discerning heart, so that there will never have been anyone like you, nor will there ever be.” 1 Kings 4:29-34 tells us that God gave him such great wisdom that he outclassed the finest teachers of the world and received visitors from every nation who shared his passion to find out how to live life God’s way. It also tells us that he wrote 3,000 proverbs and over 1,000 songs to preserve his wisdom for anyone humble enough to ask God if they can enrol in his flight school too.

Although some modern scholars have questioned whether Solomon actually wrote the three Old Testament books which we know as Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, the text of the three books seems to support the almost 3,000 years of consensus among Jews and Christians that he did so. Proverbs 1:1 describes the book as “The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel”. Song of Songs 1:1 explains that it is “Solomon’s Song of Songs”, which is a Hebrew way of saying “Solomon’s Best Song.” Ecclesiastes 1:1 and 12 describe the author as “The Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem … king over Israel in Jerusalem,” which is something only Solomon could ever say since all subsequent kings of Jerusalem ruled over Judah but not Israel. We should therefore view these books as a description of the lessons which Solomon learned through the ups and downs of his life’s flight path. We should treat them as a warning that we need help to live life God’s way.

Solomon reigned for forty years from 970 to 930BC, and during the first half of his reign he succeeded in living life God’s way. 1 Kings 10:23 celebrates the fact that “King Solomon was greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth. The whole world sought audience with Solomon to hear the wisdom God had put in his heart.” Not content with sharing his wisdom with visitors in his own generation, he devised a way that he could put succeeding generations of believers through God’s flight school too. He began to compile the book which we know as Proverbs, starting with lesson one in Proverbs 1-9, which is a call to Learn God’s Way. He created lesson two by picking 375 of his 3,000 proverbs to form the bulk of Proverbs 10-31 and spell out in detail what it means to Live God’s Way. If this longest lesson appears to jump from one theme to another, with little sense of thematic grouping, it is deliberate. Life is more complicated than flying an F-35, and it defies our attempts to compartmentalise its challenges. Since love is perhaps the most complicated aspect of them all, Solomon gave us Song of Songs as lesson three in order to teach us how to Love God’s Way.

Sadly, in the second half of his reign, Solomon failed to practise what he preached. The star student of God’s flight school, who had proved in his twenties and thirties that life works God’s way, attempted to fly solo and wrecked his life even more seriously than his father David had before him. He nosedived in his forties and fifties into the misery and despair which he describes in the book of Ecclesiastes and which serves as lesson four and as a warning that we need to Keep to God’s Way. Ecclesiastes charts his discovery that life makes no sense without God at the centre, and it describes his homeward path to a recommitment of his life to the Lord and to the fact that life only works God’s way.

So let’s enrol together in God’s flight school and go straight to the heart of the three Old Testament books which were written by Solomon. Let’s allow the wisest Old Testament writer to tell us how we can learn God’s way, live God’s way and love God’s way, just as he did. Let’s heed his warnings not to deviate from God’s flight path, as he did, but to keep to God’s way until we reach the landing lights at the end of our life’s journey.

Let’s ask the God who appeared to Solomon at the Tabernacle to give us wisdom too. Let’s ask him to teach us how to live life to the full in the world which he has made. Let’s surrender to Solomon’s ancient conclusion that life only works God’s way.

This blog is adapted from the introduction to Phil Moore’s new devotional commentary, “Straight to the Heart of Solomon”, published this month by Monarch Books. See www.philmoorebooks.com

Music To God's Ears

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 08:00:34 +0100

This blog is adapted from the introduction to Phil Moore’s new devotional commentary, “Straight to the Heart of Psalms”, published this month by Monarch Books.

MUSIC TO GOD’S EARS

“Sing joyfully to the Lord, you righteous; it is fitting for the upright to praise him.” (Psalm 33:1)

God wants to grab your attention. He could hardly have made it any clearer. He made Psalms the central book of the Bible. He made it contain the Bible’s middle chapter and middle verse. He made it by far the longest book of the Bible, with more than twice as many chapters as the next longest book. He made it contain the longest chapter in the Bible and then, for effect, he made it home to the shortest chapter too. He inspired the writers of the New Testament to quote more from Psalms than from any other book in the Old Testament – at least seventy-five times directly and many more times indirectly. So don’t miss the many ways that God is shouting for your attention. He has something vitally important to teach you through the book of Psalms.

Psalms is a book which shows us how to relate to God. The fourth-century writer Athanasius observed that this book is unique because, whilst the rest of the Bible speaks to us, Psalms speaks for us. It teaches us how to relate to God as friends, which is why no other book in human history has been as loved, valued and memorised by so many people from so many different nations. The American president John Adams spoke for millions when he told Thomas Jefferson that “The Psalms of David, in sublimity, beauty, pathos, and originality, or in one word poetry, are superior to all the odes, hymns, and songs in any language.” God gave us these hundred and fifty worship songs because he wants to teach us how to pray the kind of prayers which are music to his ears.

Psalms makes it clear that God wants us to sing to him. Spiritual discussions and resolutions have their value, but they can never substitute for building a relationship with God through singing simple love songs. One of my friends discovered this when he started coming to some of the meetings at the church I lead. As a typically reserved Englishman, he was so appalled by our worship that he went home and googled “churches without singing.” Thankfully, he couldn’t find any, because he later shared at his baptism that it was the sight of hundreds of people singing out their love for God which melted his heart and turned him into a passionate worshipper too.

The Hebrews called Psalms tehillîm, which means songs of praise. The Greeks called it psalmoi, which means songs, and it is from this that we get our own name for this collection. In case we forget that a relationship with God always involves singing, Psalms tells us that God wants us to worship him “with stringed instruments” and on the “trumpet … harp and lyre … strings and pipe … with resounding cymbals.” Shortly after he triggered the greatest Christian revival Europe has ever seen, Martin Luther told his converts that “Music is a gift and grace of God, not an invention of men. Thus it drives out the devil … I would allow no man to preach or teach God’s people without a proper knowledge of the use and power of sacred song.” We discover this as we read the book of Psalms.

But don’t imagine that Psalms is like Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music”, shutting her eyes to reality by singing about a few of her favourite things. The psalms teach us how to relate to God in the bad times, in the dark times, and in times so confusing that we want to throw in the towel on our faith altogether. The psalmists are shockingly honest with God about how they feel, because life isn’t always easy. They teach us to sing the blues as well as happy songs because how we worship in the difficult times is just as much music to God’s ears. The Christian writer Eugene Peterson confesses that without Psalms he would not know how to keep on worshipping at all:

“I need a language that is large enough to maintain continuities, supple enough to express nuances across a lifetime that brackets child and adult experiences, and courageous enough to explore all the countries of sin and salvation, mercy and grace, creation and covenant, anxiety and trust, unbelief and faith that comprise the continental human condition … Where will we acquire a language that is adequate for these intensities? Where else but in the Psalms? For men and women who are called to leadership in the community of faith, apprenticeship in the Psalms is not an option; it is a mandate.”[1]

Psalms took almost a thousand years to write – far longer than any other book in the Bible. Moses wrote Psalm 90 in about 1410BC and Psalm 137 appears to have been written in about 530BC. Some time after that, God inspired some of the worship leaders at the Temple in Jerusalem to compile a collection of a hundred and fifty of the best psalms from the several thousand which were then in circulation.[2] Some of the psalms they collated were already part of mini-collections,[3] but God inspired them to gather them into the five books which make up Psalms in order to teach us how to pray and worship.

Book I comprises Psalms 1-41 and it focuses on the character of God in order to teach us how to sing about who God is. Book II comprises Psalms 42-72 and it teaches us how to sing when times are hard. Book III comprises Psalms 73-89 and it models how God wants you to sing out how you really feel. Book IV comprises Psalms 90-106 and it charts the history of God’s dealings with the human race so that we can learn to sing about God’s plan. Book V comprises Psalms 107-150 and it ends the book of Psalms with a call for you to sing your response to God.

It’s very tempting to ignore the way that the Temple worship leaders structured Psalms and to study its contents by theme, but I am convinced that this structure is our God-given commentary on the meaning of these worship songs. Throughout this book we will therefore resist the urge to pluck a few favourite verses out of context, looking instead at each psalm or cluster of psalms as a unit which teaches us a particular lesson about how we are to worship God. As we do so, we will learn how we can get to know God deeply as our friend, as did the writers of the psalms.

Make no mistake about it: God wants to grab your attention. He wants to teach you how to grow in a relationship with him. He wants to teach you how to sing the kind of worship songs which have always been, in every generation, sweet music to God’s ears.

This blog is adapted from the introduction to Phil Moore’s new devotional commentary, “Straight to the Heart of Psalms”, published this month by Monarch Books. Read more at www.philmoorebooks.com

[1] Eugene Peterson in “Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity” (1987).

[2] There are many psalms in Scripture which were not included in the book of Psalms – see Exodus 15:1-21, Deuteronomy 31:30-32:47, Judges 5:1-31, 1 Samuel 2:1-10 & Isaiah 38:9-20. Similarly, 1 Kings 4:32 tells us that Solomon wrote 1,005 songs, but only two of them were included as Psalms 72 & 127.

[3] We can still see the names of these mini-collections in the titles of some psalms – for example the ‘songs of ascents’. Psalm 72:20 must have been the end of a mini-collection, since many more psalms of David follow.

Margaret Thatcher's Legacy

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:03:00 +0100

“When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.” So reads the old Native American proverb. If we accept those criteria then Margaret Thatcher’s life was a great success and a great failure, all at the same time.

Very few people have polarised public opinion as massively as Margaret Thatcher. Even in death, she displayed her ability to excite both admiration and contempt in equal measure. By attending her funeral this week, Queen Elizabeth II effectively raised its status to that of a state funeral. By sending “Ding dong, the Witch is Dead” to number two in the charts, thousands of other people expressed a very different assessment of her legacy.

What I find interesting is that my Christian friends are just as divided over Margaret Thatcher’s legacy. Within minutes of news breaking of her death, one of my friends who leads a church in London had tweeted that she was a fine Christian woman whose politics saved Britain. A few minutes later, two other friends who are also church leaders posted on Facebook that she did more to promote evil and social injustice than any British leader since World War Two. It made me wonder what Solomon, the wisest ruler of the Old Testament, would want to tell us about her legacy. We aren’t left guessing because he uses three different words for “the poor” throughout the book of Proverbs which shed great light on the true legacy of Britain’s longest-serving prime minister of the twentieth century.

The first word which Solomon uses is “atsel”, which means “sluggard”. It supports Thatcher’s view that some people are poor because they refuse to do all they can to help themselves. The Bible won’t indulge naivety and over-simplistic answers to the issue of poverty. Thatcher opposed the view that big business is always bad and that state handouts are always good, claiming in her 1979 election campaign that this was why “Labour Isn’t Working”. She won the election because people agreed with her. So did Solomon when he writes that “The labourer’s appetite works for him; his hunger drives him on” (16:26) and that “One who is slack in his work is brother to the one who destroys” (18:9). Part of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy is a recognition that the poor need more than unquestioning welfare and unthinking charity.

But this isn’t the complete story. The second word which Solomon uses is “ani”, which means “oppressed” or “ravaged”. He uses it to make it clear that many of those who are in poverty are poor because of the actions of others - through unfair wages, high-interest loans, and an economic system which favours the rich at the expense of the poor. They need to be offered something more than the free market which accentuates their problems. Solomon doesn’t just call helping the poor an act of “mercy” (something magnanimous which we might choose to do). He calls it an act of “justice” (something which we owe to the poor because they have been made in God’s image). Some of the northern towns which celebrated Thatcher’s death did so because they felt that she forgot this. We haven’t grasped her legacy fully unless we recognise that we can all forget it too.

But by far the most common Hebrew word which Solomon uses for the poor is the neutral word “rush”. It is a word which doesn’t tell us whether they are deserving or undeserving. It doesn’t have to because God’s call for us to help the poor doesn’t depend on whether they deserve it but on whether HE deserves it. Solomon tells us that “Whoever oppresses the poor insults their Maker, but whoever is generous to the needy honours him” (14:31). When we help the poor regardless of whether we consider them deserving or undeserving, we express the same Gospel which Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 8:9 - “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that through his poverty you might become rich.” Jesus didn’t make distinctions when he shed his blood for the world. He died for all of us, even though none of us were truly deserving, and now he sends us into the world to demonstrate that belief in him is always “good news for the poor.”

So we can learn from Margaret Thatcher’s view that some people’s poverty is caused by the fact that they are sluggards and that their greatest need is a firm hand. We can also learn from her failure to do enough to help the oppressed, assuming that they could pull themselves up by their own boot straps. And we should be challenged that the poor are still with us today. Margaret Thatcher has now stood before her Maker. For those of us who live on, it is time to consider what our own life’s legacy will be.

Phil Moore leads Everyday Church in London (@philmoorelondon).
His latest book “Straight to the Heart of Solomon” was published this week by Monarch Books.

This article was originally produced for the Evangelical Alliance’s “Friday Night Theology” series - www.eauk.org

Resurrection Sunday - only 3 days to go

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 12:13:14 +0000

It’s only three days to go until Easter Sunday. If you live in Southwest London, that means it’s three days until Resurrection Sunday in more ways than one.

First and foremost, Easter Sunday marks the anniversary of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead 1,983 ago. This was such a turning point in human history that we still mark it with a four-day weekend and by giving one another chocolate eggs which speak of new life breaking out from inside a closed tomb.

But secondly, if you live in Southwest London, Easter Sunday marks the resurrection day for some of the area’s most historic churches.

In Kingston, the iconic eighteenth-century church building on Union Street will be reopened as Everyday Church Kingston. An ancient building which has stood at the heart of Kingston life for seven generations has been refurbished and is being relaunched with a new congregation who have plans to make an everyday difference to the community once again.

In Southfields, the Victorian church building directly opposite the Tube station will be reopened as Everyday Church Southfields. The refurbishment work has been completed and a new congregation are moving into the building to carry on the church’s history at the heart of Southfields. The months of death, closure and burial have been worth it. An amazing new chapter is about to start on Resurrection Sunday.

In Wimbledon, another great church will become known as Everyday Church Wimbledon. This church gathered ten per cent of Wimbledon’s entire population in Victorian times and it is still one of the largest and most influential churches in the area. It has changed its name from Queens Road Church, it has sent scores of church members to Kingston and Southfields, and it has dug deep into its pockets to finance what will happen on Resurrection Sunday.

Everyday Church will be one church with four services in three venues in three London boroughs. It will be a church with one vision: Loving Jesus and living his mission. It will be a church with one message: Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead 1,983 years ago and he still brings God’s resurrection power to those who surrender to his agenda in Southwest London.

You can find out all about the Easter Sunday services at Everyday Kingston, Everyday Southfields and Everyday Wimbledon by going to www.everyday.org.uk

So have a very happy Resurrection Sunday. Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead, and his resurrection power is breaking out in the communities across Southwest London!

The World's Forgotten Holocaust

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 11:28:33 +0000

“I had no idea, when the war came to an end, of the horrible massacres which had occurred; the millions and millions that have been slaughtered. That dawned on us gradually after the struggle was over.”These are the words which Winston Churchill spoke to a crowded House of Commons in the months immediately after the end of World War Two. The Allies had inadvertently thwarted a holocaust which had claimed the lives of over 6 million Jews.

Today, however, an even greater holocaust is taking place, and it is a holocaust which the governments of America, Britain and the other wartime allies have failed to do anything to prevent. In part this is because they are afraid of China which now holds the bank bonds upon which many Western economies depend. But it is also because these one-time holocaust fighters now have plenty of blood from this fresh holocaust on their own hands too.

Earlier this month the Chinese Health Ministry published its statistics for abortions in China since 1971. In just shy of 40 years, the Chinese government has confessed to the abortion of 336,000,000 foetuses. That’s equivalent to the entire population of the USA and Australia combined. Whether we are Democrat or Republican, Conservative or Liberal, pro-life or pro-choice, this ought to matter to us all.

It should matter if you believe in a woman’s right to choose. Between a third and a half of these abortions were carried out against the express wishes of the mother. Worried by soaring population growth, the Chinese government has enforced a ‘one-child policy’ for families during most of the past 40 years. Parents who conceived a second baby were forced to pay a heavy fine or, if too poor, to undergo a forced abortion. A conservative estimate puts the number of forced abortions in China at 137,000,000. That’s as many killings as the whole of World War One and World War Two put together. And it’s something which not a single voice in the United Nations has condemned.

It should matter to you if believe in the sanctity of human life. You don’t have to agree with the Bible’s statements that life begins at conception (Psalm 139:13-16) or that foetuses are real people (Luke 1:41-44). You simply have to agree that the rightness or wrongness of a culture is made most evident by the way it treats the weakest of the weak. Is it right that in the trial of Chris Huhne, the disgraced British politician, in February 2013, the media were more up in arms that he tried to force his wife to take his speeding fine than that he forced her to abort her now-18-year-old son? Is it right that the most dangerous place to be in a Western nation is inside your mother’s womb?

It should matter to you if you believe in American values. Barack Obama was right to point out in his second inauguration speech earlier this year that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness … Together we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.” Barack Obama was right but he wasn’t right enough. He didn’t put two add two together and confess that his generation had betrayed the founding fathers by aborting 55,000,000 of the most vulnerable Americans since the Roe vs Wade ruling in 1973.

It should matter to you if you believe in economics. Most Western nations are facing an economic crisis caused by their rapidly ageing populations. People are living longer and the birth rate hasn’t been high enough for the past 40 years to produce enough young workers to fund the cost of pensions and healthcare for the old. Mass immigration has masked the scale of the problem, but it has brought with it fresh problems of its own. No politician has so far dared to speak out the unpalatable truth: that the birth rate would have been 50% higher in nations like my own one, the UK, had it not been for the abortion of 200,000 foetuses each year. That’s a third of all human deaths each year in the UK combined.

It should matter to you if you hate all forms of racism. A recent paper published by the American anti-racism charity Protecting Black Life revealed that 79% of abortion facilities in the USA are located within walking distance of large African-American or Latino communities. A National Vital Statistics Report in June 2012 revealed that black women are five times more likely to have abortions than white women. It’s no wonder that many leaders within the black and Latino communities have started to question whether their Western abortion laws are in fact a legalised form of genocide.

It should matter to you if you believe in good medicine. We don’t have to delve back into history for the Hippocratic Oath in the fifth century BC which made ancient doctors pledge that “I will give no deadly drug to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to procure abortion.” All we need to do is go back to the Declaration of Geneva in 1948: “I will maintain the utmost respect for human life from the time of conception.” If you have any doubt whether these statements about the practice of medicine, both ancient and modern, still apply, then take a look at some of the outstanding pictures of foetuses which modern medicine has furnished us with here: http://tinyurl.com/cw8h3wf

Last, but by no means least, it should matter to you if you care about the many women who undergo abortions. I have lost count of the number of women I have come into contact with who have expressed their deep sense of guilt and anger that abortion was presented to them by politicians and doctors as nothing more than a piece of minor surgery, and yet who have found their lives are scarred by a sense that they took the life of their unborn child. I help these women by taking them to King David’s experience when he caused the death of his own child: “I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me … Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’ - and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” (Psalm 51:3 & Psalm 32:1-5). Many women have found great solace in those words, but we should all agree that it would be much better if politicians and doctors were honest up front about the trauma which abortion brings to mothers as well as to their children.

Note that although I have quoted from the Bible at times in this blog, I haven’t primarily relied on religious arguments at all. I have pointed out that every one of us - faith or no faith - should want this forgotten holocaust to end. For the sake of a woman’s right to choose as well as for the right of a foetus to live; for the sake of good economics as well as of good medicine; for the sake of Western values as well as for the sake of stamping out Western racism.

World War Two historian Donald L. Niewyk reminds us in his book “The Holocaust” that “the main features of the Jewish Holocaust are clearly visible to all but the wilfully blind.” The same is true of this new holocaust. It’s time we all agreed on this and started making plans as allied nations how we can bring it to an end.

Resurrection Sunday - 1 month to go

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:34:37 +0000

Today it is exactly one month until Resurrection Sunday. It is only 31 days until Everyday Church becomes one church in three venues across three London boroughs.

I’m really excited with the way that things are coming together. The building projects are finishing, the new congregations are gathering, the leadership teams are forming, and the launch plans are finalising. But, above all this, I am excited that the whole church is uniting for 40 days of prayer and fasting for our church and city and nation. D.L. Moody famously said that “Every great move of God can be traced back to a kneeling figure.” That’s why I’m so excited about the many kneeling figures at Everyday Church.

In my down time from the busy activity of launch preparations, I have been taking time to walk with Charles Spurgeon who planted these venues well over 100 years ago. I have just finished reading his two-volume autobiography in order to discover the secrets behind the original launch of the churches which are becoming Everyday Kingston, Everyday Wimbledon and Everyday Southfields. Again and again, the same theme re-emerges. These were churches which were planted through prayer.

When Charles Spurgeon planted the church which is about to become Everyday Church Kingston, he wrote to the founding congregation in 1857, saying “Hold up [your ] hands in earnest prayer and may the Lord send a revival into your midst which shall be greater than even our largest desires can wish.” I believe that those prayers are being answered, even now, and I believe that our prayer and fasting as a church is preparing us to steward the great revival for which Charles Spurgeon prayed in the very early days.

If you are part of Everyday Church or if you are simply a well-wishing onlooker who is willing to pray for us, then I would like to give you one short quote from Spurgeon during the period when he planted Everyday Kingston and Wimbledon. May it stir you to pray the kind of prayers which get an answer from heaven. May it encourage you to be all that God calls you to be at this crucial time in prayer:

“If we are to receive … a blessing … we must sincerely desire it, confidently expect it, and go straight to God and ask for it. There is no need for us to go beating about the bush …

I believe in business prayers. I mean, prayers in which you take to God one of the many precious promises which he has given us in his Word, and expect it to be fulfilled as certainly as we look for the money to be given to us when we go to the bank to cash a cheque or a note. We should not think of going there, lolling over the counter, chatting with the clerks upon every conceivable subject except the one thing for which we had gone to the bank, and then coming away without the coin we needed, but we should lay before the clerk the promise to pay the bearer a certain sum, tell him in what form we wished to take the amount, count the cash after him and then go our way to attend to other business.

That is just an illustration of the method in which we should draw supplies from the Bank of Heaven. We should seek out the promise which applies to that particular case, plead it before the Lord in faith, expect to have the blessing to which it relates, and then, having received it, let us proceed to the next duty devolving upon us.”

Let’s not just read Charles Spurgeon’s words. Let’s be like the man who planted 62 churches in just 11 years. Let’s pray business prayers which lay hold of God to bless Kingston, Southfields and Wimbledon. Let’s be specific about we want in our prayer and fasting, and let’s draw great supplies from the Bank of Heaven for Everyday Church. Let’s be kneeling figures who start a great movement of God.

If you aren’t sure what to pray, then download our prayer guide at www.everyday.org.uk/40days If you know what to pray but find prayer hard, then come to our Wednesday lunchtime or Friday sunrise prayer meetings. If you can’t come to the prayer meetings then gather friends and family to start praying for a mighty work of God to accompany the launch of 3 Everyday venues in exactly one month’s time.

These three churches have an amazing history, but as they become the first three venues of Everyday Church they are going to open up a new and even more exciting chapter in God’s purposes. Through your prayers, we stand on the brink of an amazing adventure with God.

So it’s one month to go and counting - counting on your faithful prayers to usher in a mighty work of God.

God's Good News for Gays

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:00:09 +0000

If you were confused by what the Bible says about homosexuality before the start of this year, then the past six weeks can’t have made it any easier.

First, President Barack Obama referred back to the Bible when he announced in his inauguration speech that he is in favour of same-sex marriage because “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are createdequal, that they are endowed by their Creatorwith certain unalienable rights.” Next, Prime Minister David Cameron took an opposite view by admitting that his parliamentary bill to legalise same-sex marriage in the UK is a proposal which sets him at odds with many within Britain’s religious communities. Finally, just to make the air of confusion even greater, one of the most influential British church leaders came out with his view that the Bible doesn’t oppose same-sex marriage at all. Confused yet? Well, if so you’re not alone.

There has never been a time when we have needed more clarity on what the Bible says on homosexuality than now, but there has never been a time when church leaders have been more afraid to give it. It’s easier to read about the intimidation which the early Christians suffered at the hands of the sexually permissive Roman Empire than it is to risk intimidation at the hands of our own similarly sexually permissive culture.

But so many honest people are searching for honest answers that in this blog I’m going to try to explain what Paul says in one of the most important chapters in the Bible on how God views homosexual sex and same-sex marriage. I’m going to explain what Paul means when he writes in Romans 1:26-27 that ”God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another.”

First, the cultural background. Writing to Rome to say that homosexuality was sinful was like writing to France to forbid the use of garlic in cooking. Gay relationships were simply part-and-parcel of Roman life. They had practically become a national institution.

When Paul wrote this letter to the Romans in 57AD, the city was as entrenched in homosexuality as ancient Greece before it, where the custom of pederasty made gay sex a rite of passage for boys, and where the poetess Sappho wrote so many love songs to the women of Lesbos that we still refer to her lifestyle as lesbianism. Tacitus laments that under Nero, “Promiscuity and degradation throve. Roman morals had long become impure, but never was there so favourable an environment for debauchery as among this filthy crowd” (Annals 14.15). He even tells us that Nero “went through a formal wedding ceremony with one of the perverts named Pythagoras. The emperor, in the presence of witnesses, put on the bridal veil. Dowry, marriage bed, wedding torches, all were there.” (Annals 15.37).

Suetonius gives a similar view of gay Rome: “Having tried to turn the boy Sporus into a girl by castration, Nero went through a wedding ceremony with him – dowry, bridal veil and all – took him to his palace with a great crowd in attendance, and treated him as a wife.” He adds a third story that Nero “was dispatched – shall we say? – by his freedman Doryphorus. Doryphorus now married him – just as he himself had married Sporus – and on the wedding night he imitated the screams and moans of a girl being deflowered” (Life of Nero, 28-29).

In light of this, Paul’s comments here about homosexuality were both controversial and dangerous. It begs the question why he chose to tackle this issue in particular, when he had even more reasons that we do to avoid it?

Paul makes this his focus because gay sex is sinful. That’s about as unpopular a sentence as any you could read in our culture, but it was just as unpopular in first-century Rome. Paul writes in these two verses that homosexuality is shameful, unnatural, indecent, and a perversion. He is so clear about this that the only way we can miss it is by having already made up our minds to disregard the things he says. Yet note that Paul does not insult gay people themselves. Instead, he states something even more controversial: he says that their actions are simply the outworking of a culture which has rejected God.

Paul makes this his focus because gay attraction is a symptom of a race which has rejected God. Note his argument: People know from creation what God is like but they deliberately resolve to suppress the truth about him. He responds by ‘darkening their hearts’ so that they begin to worship creatures, and by handing them over to reap what they have sown. Since they reject God the Father, Son and Spirit – different yet one – their blind eyes no longer recognise that “in the image of God … male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). They forget in verse 21 that sex is a way to glorify God and be thankful, because “refusing to know God, they soon didn’t know how to be human either” (this is a paraphrase of verse 26 in ‘The Message’ translation) Although Paul wasn’t part of the modern debate over whether gay attraction is a matter of nature or nurture, he answers the question by telling us they are neither. They are the natural expression of a culture which rejects God. Being gay actually feels right to homosexuals because they live in a culture which has suppressed God’s truth and been given over “to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done.” Conservatives may feel an instinctive repulsion to this behaviour, but since they cannot articulate why they feel it, they quickly lose the cultural battle. Very soon they wake up in the world of verse 32, where people “not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practise them.”

Enough of Paul confronting Gentile homosexuality in Rome. Are you ready now for something even more surprising? Paul also makes this his focus because homophobia is sinful too. If you find yourself nodding at Paul’s teaching and revelling in his attack on homosexuality, then he also chose to highlight this as an issue because of you. He is laying a trap which he springs in 2:1 on the moralists who are guilty of first-century homophobia: “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself!” He knew that Jewish Christians quoted Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 to push gay people away as “detestable”. Therefore he lists it alongside envy and lying and hatred and gossip to demonstrate that it is simply one of many expressions of human rebellion. Was Nero worse in his homosexuality than when he raped a Vestal Virgin, committed incest with his mother, took a freedwoman as his mistress, or kicked his pregnant wife to death during an argument? Of course not. Paul focuses on homosexuality because it roots out moralisers, so that he can deal with them at the beginning of chapter 2.

But beyond all these things, Paul makes this his focus because Jesus saves both homosexuals and homophobes. If we pretend that gay pride isn’t sinful then we won’t ask him to deliver gay people, but if we rail against the gay community we will lead them to believe that church is the last place for them to find any deliverance. If we try to help them when they come by addressing their homosexuality as if it were the root issue, then we won’t manage to help them either. Yet if we treat it – like Paul in chapter 1 – as one of the fruits of rejecting God, whilst avoiding the judgmentalism he tackles in chapter 2, then we will truly build churches where gay people can be saved. We will be able to say along with Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11:

“Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”

That’s why Paul got so excited when he wrote to gay Rome and began to share the Gospel by talking about homosexuality. He didn’t see the gay pride of Rome as a reason to keep quiet. He saw it as a reason to proclaim the Gospel even more confidently because it is God’s good news for gays.

Same-Sex Marriage: Three Big Mistakes

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 12:50:03 +0000

If you believe the newspapers then it’s already been decided. The fight to legalise same-sex marriage has already been won.

Prime Minister David Cameron has introduced a bill to the British Parliament which will be debated on 5^th February and which is not being opposed by the opposition. President Obama has used his second inauguration speech to signal that he also intends to legalise gay marriage in the US through federal law. The French President Francois Hollande has dismissed public protests over his support for same-sex marriage as the reactionary chattering of the no-longer-radical bourgeoisie. But whilst politicians steamroller their proposals into law, they are ignoring some fundamental questions. Let me point out just three of the big mistakes which they are making:-

MISTAKE #1: EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT SAME-SEX MARRIAGE SHOULD BE LEGALISED

Suppose we held a referendum which revealed that this statement is true. Suppose that a majority of Britons and Americans did actually believe that same-sex marriage should be legalised – would that therefore make it right?

If a majority of Afghans voted that women should be barred from education, they wouldn’t therefore be right. When a majority of British people voted in the early nineteenth century that there was nothing wrong with slavery, campaigners didn’t stop arguing that the majority were wrong. In fact, the essence of the pro-gay argument is that majority opinion has been wrong in the past on the issue of sexuality! Even in the purest of democracies, it is accepted that majority opinion should be tested rather than turned into hastily drafted law. Consensus has long been the refuge of rascals, who attempt to stifle debate by claiming that the matter has already been decided.

What is becoming clear, anyway, is that the majority of people do not in fact back this major change to society. Although the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, argued in last Sunday’s issue of ‘The Times’ that redefining marriage will be a vote-winner for the Conservatives, the real noise at Conservative head office is that of the large numbers of Tories who feel betrayed that this legislation was not in the party’s election manifesto. The British Youth Parliament has called on the government to drop gay marriage as a priority. In scenes reminiscent of the days before the war with Iraq, we are watching politicians making decisions without consulting those who elected them, only to regret their hastiness too late afterwards.

MISTAKE #2: SEXUALITY IS A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE

When Lady Gaga sings “Baby, I was born this way”, it makes for good music. When Barack Obama embraces it as a political philosophy, it makes for bad government. He used his inauguration speech to liken the fight for same-sex marriage to the epic struggle won by Abraham Lincoln against black slavery and by Martin Luther King against racial segregation, saying: “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law - for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.” Barack Obama is a master at rhetoric, but this is lazy at best and insulting at worst. Issues of race and of sexuality are entirely different. To try to twist this is not to carry on the journey started by Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. It is to insult what they stood for and to try and hijack their legacy.

I have searched in vain for a robust medical study which shows that our sexuality is written deep into our DNA. It hasn’t been proved that homosexuality is genetic any more than it has been proved that homosexuality is caused by our environment. It appears that it is simply one of many sexual preferences which societies ought to weigh carefully and then label right or wrong. A boy who falls in love with his sister can’t marry her, because we have ruled that incest is wrong. A man who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl can’t marry her, because we have ruled that child abuse is wrong. We may decide that a man falling in love with a man is equally valid to a man falling in love with a woman (despite the fairly obvious biological evidence to the contrary), but we can’t do so by appealing to genetics and civil rights. Men are twice as likely as women to become addicted to pornography, but their XY chromosomes don’t mean that their temptation is justified. It simply means that they need to engage in debate on whether they ought to become an accessory to the sexual exploitation which lies at the heart of the pornography industry.

It’s entirely right for us to have a free and open debate on whether homosexuality is right or wrong, but it’s entirely wrong to pretend that this is a civil rights issue like black slavery or racial segregation. This is all about moral choices, not genetics. Barack Obama should be ashamed of himself for insulting the memory of Lincoln and King by suggesting otherwise.

MISTAKE #3: OPPOSITION TO SAME-SEX MARRIAGE IS A RELIGIOUS ISSUE

In the UK, David Cameron and Nick Clegg have tried to frame the issue of same-sex marriage as a battle between free-thinking reformers and religious reactionaries. They have shouted down opposition to their bill by promising that churches and mosques will be protected from being forced to conduct same-sex marriages on their premises, and the Church of England has been flattered into playing along in exchange for a seat at the discussion table. Even if we believe Cameron and Clegg (and let’s face it, it’s hard to do so when Cameron has just warned the church on another issue to “get with the programme” or face the consequences), it is missing the point entirely. It isn’t just Christians, Jews and Muslims who want to have a say over this issue. Marriages make families and families make society. How we define marriage affects all of us. To deny this is ridiculous.

I received a letter from David Cameron a few weeks ago when I corresponded with him about same-sex marriage. He told me that he thinks marriage is so important that he wants to open it up to same-sex couples as well, which is about as logical as me saying that I like Italian food so much that I want to declare every cuisine in the world to be Italian. It isn’t just an issue for religious people when our governments start redefining marriage with political double-speak which wouldn’t be out of place in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. Even in decadent Rome, when the Emperor Nero briefly legalised same-sex marriage, his pagan Roman subjects opposed his law. The historian Tacitus complained that Nero “went through a formal wedding ceremony with one of the perverts named Pythagorus” and implies that this added to the general public disgust with Nero which eventually led to his forced suicide (‘Annals’ 15.37). If the most anti-Christian city in the world opposed gay marriage (remember, these were the people who threw Christians to the lions), then let’s not pretend that opposition to same-sex marriage is a religious issue.

Besides, when Barack Obama refers 6 times in his inauguration speech to God and 4 times to the Creator or to Creation, it reminds us that religious people have always had an important role in shaping public policy for good. Not least among them were Abraham Lincoln (a devout Christian) and Martin Luther King (a Christian pastor). Politicians can’t have it both ways: either they want to associate themselves with God and with the great religious thinkers of the past, or they should come clean and say that they don’t want to.

The reason why Barack Obama referred so much to God and to the great religious thinkers of the past is because he knows that a nation is doomed to failure if it drafts laws based on its own generation’s best thinking alone. The nations which prosper are those which have learned to drink deeply from the best thinkers of the past few thousand years. To dismiss religious thinkers as nothing more than a group of political lobbyists is an act of insanity. They are those who have routinely submitted their own generation’s thinking to the scrutiny of the wise men and women of old, and who have learned to speak up for what they have learned.

The true political lobbyists are the pro-gay activists who have filled the staff roles in 10 Downing Street and in the West Wing. It is this small but powerful clique which has so influenced the politicians that they can’t see the three big mistakes which they are making. Same-sex marriage isn’t a religious issue any more than it is a civil rights issue. It is the coveted ambition of a group of powerful lobbyists who want to stifle debate by claiming the debate is already over. We mustn’t let them succeed in rushing through this piece of hasty legislation.

The British Thinker Who Justified Genocide

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 15:19:25 +0000

Charles Darwin is a great British hero. That’s hardly surprising, since he was one of the greatest and most influential thinkers of the past two hundred years. I happened to live in the house opposite Charles Darwin’s former lodgings when I was a student at Cambridge University, so I looked out each morning on a blue plaque hailing him as one of the greatest Britons who ever lived. Now I’m not saying that he didn’t deserve that commemorative blue plaque on the wall, but I feel I have to point out that he wasn’t a British hero but a British villain. You don’t have to be a bible-thumping evangelical to question whether Charles Darwin’s thinking deserves to be given a bit more thought. Whatever your views on origins and evolution, we can hopefully all agree that, at present, we give far too much honour to the British thinker who justified genocide.

Darwin didn’t hide his view that his evolutionary thinking applied to human races as well as to animal species. The full title of his seminal book in 1859 was ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’. He followed this up more explicitly in his later book ‘The Descent of Man’ by spelling out his racial theory: “The western nations of Europe … now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors [that they] stand at the summit of civilisation … The civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races through the world.” (Vol II, p796-797)

Today, most British people are thankfully pretty embarrassed by the racist rhetoric which undergirded the late-Victorian British Empire. What is astonishing is how little they understand that Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution provided the doctrine behind its white supremacism. Whereas the British Empire of the early nineteenth century had been dominated by Christian reformers such as William Wilberforce who sold badges of black slaves which proclaimed, “Am I, too, not a brother?”, Charles Darwin’s writings converted an empire with a conscience into an empire with a scientific philosophy instead. Four years after Darwin published his ‘Origin of Species’, James Hunt turned it into a justification for slavery. He argued in his paper ‘On the Negro’s Place in Nature’, published in 1863, that “Our Bristol and Liverpool merchants, perhaps, helped to benefit the race when they transported some of them to America.” Christian reformers had spent decades in the first half of the nineteenth century teaching Britain to view non-European races as their equals before God. In a matter of years, Darwin not only swept God off the table but also swept the value of people of every race in God’s eyes off the table with him.

Victorian Britain was only too willing to accept Darwinian Evolution as the gospel of its overseas expansion. Darwin is still celebrated on the back of the British £10 note for his discovery of many new species on his visit to Australia, but what has been forgotten is his contemptible attitude towards the Aborigines he also found there due to his beliefs about natural selection. When ‘The Melbourne Review’ used his teachings to justify the genocide of the indigenous people of Australia in 1876, he didn’t try and stop them. When the Australian newspaper argued that “the inexorable law of natural selection [justifies] exterminating the inferior Australian and Maori races … The world is better for it” because failure to do so would actually be “promoting the non-survival of the fittest, protecting the propagation of the imprudent, the diseased, the defective and the criminal,” it was Christian missionaries who raised an outcry on behalf of this forgotten genocide. Charles Darwin simply commented that “I do not know of a more striking instance of the comparative rate of increase of a civilised over a savage race” (quoted in Nicholas and Nicholas ‘Charles Darwin in Australia’ p97).

Meanwhile, several thousand miles away, Cecil Rhodes was gleefully embracing Charles Darwin’s thinking as the justification for white expansion across Southern Africa. He was so inspired by the thinking of the Darwinian evolutionist Winwood Reade in his book ‘The Martyrdom of Man’ that he later confessed that “That book has made me what I am.” What it made him was the architect of one of the most brutal and immoral acts of European expansion and genocide in history. He wrote in 1877 that “I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race … It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honourable race the world possesses.” (John Flint ‘Cecil Rhodes’ p24).

I have used British examples in this blog because I am British, and it seems to me to be politer to point out the errors in my own national worldview than it is in that of other nations. I could have pointed out the way that Charles Darwin’s thinking was used by late-nineteenth-century Americans to justify acts of genocide against Native Americans. I could have pointed out the ways that Hitler and his Nazi philosophers used it to justify wars of expansion and horrific holocaust. I could have pointed out the ways that Communist Russia used Darwinian evolution to justify its liquidation of non-Russian people groups within the Soviet empire. I could have pointed out the way it was used by Serbs to justify their genocide against Croatians and Kosovans.

But I don’t have to. The British example is enough to make us question whether Charles Darwin was truly a British hero at all. At the very least, we should strip him of his place on our £10 banknote and stop protecting his thinking from the scrutiny it deserves to receive in school classrooms, on TV documentaries and in the corridors of power.

Because, whether or not you agree with his thoughts on evolution, you should at the very least want to discover that he was wrong.

Who would you rather discover was right all along?

The Christian reformers of the early nineteenth century, like William Wilberforce and the Earl of Shaftesbury, who argued from belief in divine creation that slaves should be set free and that children should not be forced to work themselves to death in the factories for having been born to the wrong parents?

Or Charles Darwin, who argued from his belief in a godless beginning to the universe that natural selection was a virtue and that, consequently, acts of genocide were part and parcel of the way the world was always supposed to be?

In the words of Jesus Christ himself: ”By their fruits you will be able to judge their teaching.”

Once Upon a Time in Kingston

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 11:32:14 +0000

Last Sunday morning saw the launch of Everyday Church, London. It was an amazing first step on our journey. Even though the school holidays weren’t quite over, we still gathered over 600 people to celebrate the start of a new chapter in God’s work through us across Southwest London. If you missed the message which launched the church then you can catch it online at www.tinyurl.com/a3h5v4d

At the moment, the church is only meeting in Wimbledon, but on Easter Sunday - the day when the world remembers God’s resurrection power - it will start meeting in Kingston and Southfields too. As we get ready to replant Kingston Baptist Church and Southfields Baptist Church, I have been encouraged by reading about Tommy Medhurst, the man who originally planted Kingston Baptist Church in 1864. I’m blogging some quotations from what I have been reading here in order to encourage you as well. One day I am sure that people will write similar things about Akhtar Shah and the dozens of everyday people who have signed up to relaunch a fresh work of God in Kingston-upon-Thames on Sunday 31st March!

Charles Spurgeon writes in his autobiography:

“When Medhurst began to preach in the street, some of the very precise friends, who were at that time members at New Park Street, were greatly shocked at his want of education, so they complained to me about it, and said that I ought to stop him, for, if I did not, disgrace would be brought upon the cause. Accordingly, I had a talk with the earnest young brother, and, while he did not deny that his English was imperfect, and that he might have made mistakes in other respects, yet he said, ‘I must preach, sir; and I shall preach unless you cut off my head.’ I went to our friends, and told them what he had said, and they took it in all seriousness. ‘Oh!’ they exclaimed, ‘You can’t cut off Mr. Medhurst’s head, so you must let him go on preaching.’ I quite agreed with them.”

Charles Spurgeon continues:

“The next one to come to me in trouble was Medhurst himself. One day, with a very sad countenance, he said to me, ‘I have been preaching for three months, and I don’t know of a single soul having been converted.’ Meaning to catch him by guile, and at the same time to teach him a lesson he would never forget, I asked, ‘Do you expect the Lord to save souls every time you open your mouth?’ ‘Oh no, sir!’ he replied. ‘Then,’ I said, ‘that is just the reason why you have not had conversions: According to your faith be it unto you.’”

One final quote from Charles Spurgeon:

“When I visited Kingston-upon-Thames, after Medhurst had become pastor of the church there, I wanted to find out what the people thought of him, so I spoke of him with apparent coolness to an estimable lady of his congregation. In a very few moments, she began to speak quite warmly in his favour. She said, ‘You must not say anything against him, sir … He has been a blessing to my family and servants.’ I went out into the street, and saw some men and women standing about, so I said to them, ‘I must take your minister away.’ ‘If you do,’ they exclaimed, ‘we will follow you all over the world to get him back; you surely will not be so unkind as to take away a man who has done so much good to our souls?’ After collecting the testimony of fifteen or sixteen persons, I said, ‘If the man gets such witnesses as these to the power of his ministry, I will gladly let him go on where he is; for it is clear that the Lord has called him into His service.’”

I count it an amazing privilege to lead Everyday Church in replanting Kingston Baptist Church and re-establishing an amazing work of God in this borough of London. I am encouraged when I read about Tommy Medhurst that the same God who transformed Kingston through Spurgeon and Medhurst will do the same through us as well.

I fully expect Akhtar Shah and his leadership team to be as warmly spoken of as Tommy Medhurst. I fully expect them and the rest of the congregation to be as determined to preach in the streets of Kingston as Tommy Medhurst. I fully expect them to be just as active and effective in seeing people saved every single time they proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ.

And I fully expect the future of the church in Kingston to be even better than its illustrious past. I am expecting to hear the same words which the guests spoke at the wedding in Cana when they observed Jesus’ normal way of working in John 2:10: “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”

Why Is It Everyday Church?

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:52:01 +0000

Well. It’s official. The old signs came down this morning at our building in Wimbledon and the new signs went up. As of this morning, Everyday Church has officially arrived in Southwest London.

This coming Sunday is E-Day, the day when we meet together as a new church for the first time. The people of Queens Road Church and Southfields Baptist Church will start meeting together for twelve weeks before a second E-Day on Easter Sunday when Everyday Church will launch into two more buildings in Southfields and Kingston. We will become 1 church which meets for 4 services in 3 venues in 3 different London boroughs. If you are part of the church, then you will know that this is the culmination of over a year of God leading us through a series of miracles towards his plan to use us to bring a fresh wave of salvation across our city.

A lot of people have asked me why the new church is called “Everyday Church”, so I’m posting this blog before I go to bed on launch day in order to answer that question. The fact is, names matter, and so do the values which lie behind the choosing of a name.

We have named this new church Everyday Church because we want to state up front that we are just a bunch of everyday men, women and children. We think that London already has enough churches which boast about the greatness of their own potential. We didn’t want to call ourselves “London’s Finest Church” or the whatever the supermarket equivalent might be. We’re actually pleased to proclaim to the world that we are nothing special. Jesus taught in Matthew 5:3 that the Kingdom of God belongs to spiritual beggars, so we’re very happy to confess that that is what we are. We are bottom shelf people. We are value brand people. We are everyday people. What makes Everyday Church special is not who we are but who Jesus is. He is the one who deserves the spotlight to be on him.

We are going to spend the Sundays between now and the summer going through the book of Acts together. The sermon series will be entitled “Everyday People, Extraordinary God”. We are going to note together just how ordinary and unimpressive the apostles and the early Christians were - and how Jesus used spiritual beggars like them to transform the ancient world. We will read in Acts 4:13 how the inhabitants of the Roman Empire “saw the courage of Peter and John and realised that they were unschooled, ordinary men” and “were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.” We will grow in faith that God’s plan to save our troubled city still involves him taking everyday men and women and filling them with his extraordinary power.

We have also named this new church Everyday Church because we want to commit our lives completely to loving Jesus and living his mission. We don’t believe that London will be changed by another group of Christians who sing loudly on Sunday about what the Gospel means for themselves and yet spend Monday to Saturday neglecting to tell others what the Gospel means to them too. Nor do we believe that London will be changed by a group of Christians who compartmentalise their faith to Sunday mornings when God declares in Psalm 24:1 that he is Lord of everything in our lives and in our city. We want to commit to living as radical followers of Jesus Christ every single minute of every day. To use the words of Acts 2:42-47, we want to be like the early Christians who “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer … every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”

Everyday people following Jesus every day and seeing people saved and added to their number every day. Doesn’t that excite you?! It’s worth all the teething pains of transition and the sizeable cost which we are paying to become Everyday Church in Wimbledon, Southfields and Kingston. If you are not already part of a church, it is also worth you putting aside other priorities in order to join us too. You can find out more at

W: www.everyday.org.uk

F: www.facebook.com/everydaychurchlondon

T: @Everyday_London

T: @PhilMooreLondon

So, that’s an explanation of why it is called Everyday Church. Now it’s time to concentrate on the much harder job of living out our name right at the heart of our lost and rudderless city, every single day.

The English Census - time to panic?

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:58:16 +0000

The results of the English and Welsh 2011 Census were released in London yesterday. They provide a startling picture of how much Britain has changed in just ten years since the last big census, and many people are panicking. Among them are leading Christians, alarmed by this fresh evidence of the massive decline of Christianity in their nation. I’m a Christian but I’ve got a confession to make: I find the results of the census very exciting. I don’t feel like panicking. I feel like celebrating.

The number of English and Welsh people who describe themselves as Christians has plummeted in the past ten years - from 72% of people to only 59% of people. That’s 4,000,000 Christians wiped out of the census books in just ten years, and it’s so shocking that one political commentator joked on ITV that it hasn’t been seen since the days when the Romans threw Christians to the lions.

At the same time, the number of English and Welsh people who say they have no religious affiliation whatsoever has soared from 15% of people to 25% of people. Something has happened in the past ten years to convince 7,000,000 people that worshipping God isn’t worthwhile. A quarter of the population don’t even pretend to honour God with the way they live their lives.

So I can understand why some Christian leaders are panicking, but I don’t in any way feel tempted to join them. If you are a Christian and alarmed by the results of the census, then neither should you. Because there are some other statistics which make it clear that God hasn’t finished with the UK. Not by a country mile. I have never been more excited about what God is about to do in England, because of what the census says.

My city, London, has changed beyond recognition in the past ten years. As a white British person, I have officially become a minority in my city. Only 45% of Londoners are now white British, compared to 58% ten years ago. Only 63% of Londoners were born in the UK, and a quarter of Londoners are not British nationals. London is an extreme version of the rest of the country, but don’t miss the trend here, wherever you live. England has become the most multiracial island on the surface of the Earth. In the words of this morning’s front-page headline in “The Sun” newspaper: “We are the world.”

So when people tell you that God has finished with the UK, don’t believe them. We follow the one who said to his Son Jesus, “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession” (Psalm 2:8). Jesus has done more than ask the Father for the nations of the world; he has laid down his life to purchase them with his blood (Revelation 5:9). The only reason he stalls the Second Coming is that he plans to bring in a full Gospel harvest of those he has purchased, and there is nowhere better for him to fulfil his prayers than in England - right here and right now.

Jesus wants to save Pakistanis but militant groups in Pakistan have vowed to do all they can to stop him. This census tells us that Jesus can save Pakistanis just as easily in Putney. He wants to save North Koreans but the communist government has banned the Bible. This census tells us that Jesus can save North Koreans just as easily in New Malden. He wants to save Saudis but the Islamic government has threatened to execute anyone who renounces Islam for the sake of Jesus. This census tells us that Jesus can save Saudis just as easily in Southall. The list could go on to include all 500+ people groups which are represented in London and across the rest of England and Wales, but you get the point. This census doesn’t tell us that God has given up on the UK; it tells us that there has never been more reason for him to sweep our island with revival in order to answer his Son’s prayer.

Yes, it also shows us that institutional Christendom is in massive decline in England, but frankly that is no bad thing. A lot of Christendom wasn’t Christian at all, and many of the trappings of our nation’s flirtation with nominal Christianity in the past actually conspired against true Gospel breakthrough. It was the kind of religion which Jesus had in mind when he said “You are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm - neither hot nor cold - I am about to vomit you out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:15-16).

The 2011 English and Welsh Census reveals that Jesus has vomited, and vomited good and proper. He has snuffed out what masqueraded as religion and has begun to create a fallow field into which Gospel seed can be planted anew. At the same time, he has brought the nations of the world to England in order that they may all share in this island’s next great revival. Instead of panicking, let’s get praying.

“Ask of me and I will make the the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession.”

The Wrong Question

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 09:10:21 +0000

Has there ever been a week in which so many people who don’t go to church have had so many opinions about what should happen in church? Has there ever been a week in which so many people who have no intention of darkening the doors of a church been so passionate about what churches should or shouldn’t do?

I’m talking, of course, about the furore which has erupted since the Church of England voted last Tuesday evening not to allow women to become bishops. News reporters spoke freely about the church being out of touch with modern Britain and doomed to terminal decline. On the BBC’s “Question Time” programme last night, the panel were in agreement. Politicians who normally bend over backwards to accommodate Muslim sensitivities at any cost were united in their view that the government ought to intervene to force the Church of England to tow the line.

I am not an Anglican. I don’t feel any loyalty to the quaint and quirky voting system in the General Synod. But if nobody else will point out the obvious then I feel I have to: the debate is revolving around entirely the wrong question.

The big question is not whether there should be women bishops. It is whether there should be bishops at all. Why is there a church in Britain which mirrors the leadership structures of the world rather than the leadership structures outlined in the New Testament? When one of the panellists on “Question Time” pointed out that “The Queen is the head of the church,” she was both right and wrong at the same time. She was wrong because the New Testament is very clear that Jesus is the Head of the Church and that anybody else who tries to usurp his title had better watch out (Colossians 1:18, Ephesians 5:23). But she was right because this is the title which the Church of England has conceded to British monarchs for the past 500 years.

Then there is the question of the 28 bishops who enjoy permanent seats in the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British Houses of Parliament. This dates back to a deal which was done between the government and church in the Middle Ages, which agreed that the church would let the government interfere in its affairs if it also let the church interfere in government affairs. It’s very hard to argue that David Cameron should not be calling on the church to overturn the Synod’s vote when 28 of the 45 English bishops are part-time politicians who get to vote on his government’s legislation.

As a result of this historic intertwining of Church and Queen and Bishops and Parliament, everybody seems to be missing the point: Since Jesus is Head of the Church, he gets to decide who should lead it. Not churchgoers, not the clergy, and not the non-Christian government. Talk of equal opportunities and of a ‘stained glass ceiling’ for promotion is shows how far the Church of England has drifted from where the Church is called to be. Jesus gets to decide who should lead his Church and he gets to decide whether they should be male or female, young or old, gay or straight, right-wing or left-wing. The New Testament tells us that he has chosen for his Church to be led by teams of elders (not by bishops, regardless of whether they are male or female), and he has chosen for his Church to be free from the interference of the state.

The Queen isn’t head of Jesus’ Church. David Cameron and his Parliament of expense-fiddling politicians aren’t head of it either. Jesus is the Head of the Church and he gets to appoint the leaders he chooses. Getting back to that principle needs to be the focal point of the debate about how the Church of England should change.

The Mayor of Mayors

Fri, 04 May 2012 16:35:35 +0100

As I write this, Boris Johnson is anxiously waiting for the counting of votes to see if he is still the Mayor of London. Hundreds of Conservative and LibDem councillors have lost their seats. A senior Labour councillor has lost his seat to George Galloway’s Respect Party. It’s a magnificent reminder that human power is very fleeting.

That’s why I’m loving our new preaching series on the book of Revelation with its constant reminder that God’s power never fades away.

When John saw a vision of Jesus in Revelation 1, he recognised him as the person Daniel had described as “one like the son of man.” Daniel had dreamed a prophetic dream in 553BC in which he saw the Babylonian Empire rise and fall, the Persian Empire rise and fall, Alexander the Great’s Empire rise and fall, and the Roman Empire rise and fall. Then he had seen “one like the son of man” found a different kind of Kingdom which would conquer the whole world and which would never fade away. Jesus the Messiah would be the King of kings, the Lord of lords, the Mayor of mayors and the Councillor of councillors.

Jesus isn’t waiting for any votes to be counted today. Let’s worship him as the Ruler whose term in power will never come to an end!