Book club averages so far

Here’s what our book group has thought of the novels we have read so far. The links take you to my reviews which do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the group!

Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd – average of 8/10

Generation A, Douglas Coupland – average of 6.6/10

16 Lighthouse Road, Debbie Macomber – average of 5/10

next, we’ll be reading: So Much for That, Lionel Shriver

and then: The Novel in the Viola, Natasha Solomon

Books: Novels, Mission, and Communion

You hay have noticed that the reviews of novels have stopped. That is basically because I’m reading War and Peace which is quite long, so it’s taking me a while! I read Grisham’s ‘The Broker’ before that which i enjoyed and have written a review of on this site.

Before that I read a book called ‘God’s Smuggler’ by Brother Andrew, which is the story of the Christian missionary who used to smuggle Bibles through the Iron Curtain back in the 1950′s and 60′s. It is extremely challenging in the way we think about our faith. For example, he used to leave the Bibles in plain view of the guards when he passed through a border, convinced that God could avert their eyes if necessary! Very challenging.

I’m currently reading a book called “Mass Culture” edited by Pete Ward. It looks at eucharist, how we do it, and its implications on youth work and the general church. As the common meal passed down to us by Jesus, it has to be central to Christian worship, but Ward claims that the way in which we have been doing it in the church has become almost sacrosanct, and by failing to adapt, it often fails to speak to our congregations and culture. He suggests that we allow ourselves to play around with it a little more within the context of worship to regain the lost significance. I’ll write more on this when I’ve got further through the book.

Doubting and Faith

Scott McKnight talks about doubt and faith by reviewing Alistair McGraths book Doubting. How do we deal with it when it comes and how might we  avoid it? Scotts main points are:

(1) Know your faith: … The most powerful defense then is education. Read the scripture daily; read solid scholarly Christian literature (this blog is a good source of suggestions); read books that stimulate you to think about the content of the faith. A more reasoned faith with deep roots can be defended and shared. A “Sunday School” sophistication is not enough…

(2) Keep it in perspective: Nothing in the Christian story suggests that the Christian life is easy. … Jesus calls us to take up our cross and follow.

(3) Appreciate the importance of support: in isolation we waver and fall all too often. Go to church, worship and study in community. Search out community and be persistent… Be a church that makes support a priority.

(4) Develop spiritual discipline and make it a priority. Read books that stimulate thought about prayer, worship, devotion (Thomas a Kempis, Brother Lawrence, Dallas Willard, …). Pray and worship without fail, from the head and the heart — and from the head even when it is hard to make it from the heart.

(5) Face questions and concerns head on, with study and, if possible, in the support of community.

(6) Don’t be afraid of change – your faith should change and grow as it matures in understanding and depth in the great traditions of orthodox Christianity.

Jesus Creed » Doubt: RJS.

Total Church (vi) – Mission

Chapter 6 of Tim Chester and Steve Timmis’ book, Total church talks about the church’s need to engage in world mission. Mission, they say, is an activity of God – it is right at the very centre of his actions, from his decision to choose a people for himself who would be a light to all nations, to the Great Commission given by Jesus at the end of Matthew’s gospel.

“The term mission, [Karl Barth] pointed out, was originally used of the sending of the Son by the Father and the sending of the Spirit by the Father and the Son. To this was added the sending of the Church by the Trinity. The Triune God is a missionary God. The church, then has a mission because God has a mission. The role of the church is to participate in the mission of God. The value of this perspective is the way it roots mission in the doctrine of God rather than relegating is to allied theology”

Mission should be part of a church’s DNA. In Romans 15:19, Paul says that “from Jerusalem all the way round to Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ”. In what sense is that true? Paul preached extensively, and set up new churches, but by no means had the whole area been won for Christ! What Timmis and Chester suggest is that Paul has fully proclaimed Jesus to them. This is at the centre of mission. The rest of the work of growth, encouragement, preaching and planting was the responsibility of the local churches he left behind. Jesus was at the centre of their formation and consequently mission is part of their DNA. By no means should it be left to large mission organisations, as this simply distances the local church from the action of mission – which is part of their fundamental being. He cites the example of China – in 1945 all the mision agencies were expelled from the country, essentially leaving the task of mission to the local house-churches with no outside influence. Christianity boomed through their efforts, and because it is God’s mission.

Locally, the church engages in mission by being the community of grace and embodying the gospel of grace in the local society. On a more global scale, Chester and Timmis give examples of many local churches partnering with others around the world, or sending mission partners to various places to plant churches. All done in straight-forward ways by very ordinary people.

Slam (Nick Hornby) – a book review

Slam is another novel from Nick Hornby, one of my favourite authors. Whilst not up to his previous highs of A Long Way Down, or High Fidelity, the book has some good things going for it. It is written in Hornby’s usual light and witty style. And again, he deals with some serious issues.

Sam is a teenage boy who loves skateboarding. He’s been brought up by his mum, who was a teenage parent when she had him, and doesn’t he know it! He almost carries around the guilt that he ruined her life and he is determined not to fall into the same trap. But generally has a good relationship with his mum. He is a fairly typical teenager – one who is bored by school and who ends relationships simply by stopping calling.

However, by accident (of course), he gets Alicia, his girlfriend, pregnant. His initial reaction is to run away to Hastings, get a job, start a new life, and forget about everything. Of course, that doesn’t work and he comes home and faces up to what has happened. The rest of the book is about how Sam deals with it and comes to some maturity. Near the end, once the baby is born, the book starts to drag a little, but as I said, there are a few good points worth looking at.

Firstly, the book shows quite clearly that sex can make babies, even when you try to be careful. Current society has divorced sex from family in a way that often hides this. At no point in the book is the pregnancy a ‘problem’ that just needs to be ‘dealt with’. The pregnancy is always a baby. Abortion is mentioned but Sam and Alicia never seriously consider it (although it might have been interesting to see in the book how this conversation might have gone). Their priority is to get through the next nine months and afterwards.

Secondly, Hornby employs an interesting way for Sam to think through his feelings. Sam, being a skateboarder is a huge fan of skateboarding legend Tony Hawk (who is actually a real person). Sam has a poster of Tony on his bedroom wall and knows the words to Tony Hawk’s autobiography by heart. As a result, Sam seems to talk to Tony through the poster, and Tony talks back through the words of his book, Tony acts as a sort of interactive god to Sam, giving advice and thoughts. This reminded me a little of the Orthodox use of icons in order to commune with God, except that Tony isn’t God. It shows Sam’s need for a spiritual ‘other’ – a higher power to aspire to and to guide.

The end of the book starts to drag a little, especially once the baby is born. And it gets a little predictable. Not Nick Hornby’s best book by any means, but it’s a short read, has some funny moments, and some thoughtful ones.

Two Caravans – a book review.

In Two Caravans (sometimes sold under the title Strawberry Fields) Marina Lewycka has written a wonderful, funny, and thought provoking novel. Her first book was A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

Two Caravans examines the life of immigrant workers to the UK who are recruited to work legally and illegally picking fruit and vegetables each summer. It follows Irina, a politically western leaning Ukrainian from Kiev who has come for an adventure, and Andriy, from the industrial and mining east of Ukraine which politically looks to Russia. Irina joins a team of strawberry pickers from Poland, Ukraine, Malawi, China, and Malaysia, working on a farm in Kent. They live in two caravans by the side of the field, their food is basic, and their pay is virtually nothing. But what are they to do?

However, things start to go wrong. Irina is not very good at picking strawberries. And Vulk, the burly ‘recruitment officer’ thinks he will get better money for her by putting her to work on the streets at night. Irina runs away. Together, the rest of them hitch up one of the caravans to the farmer’s Land Rover and escape to find Irina. Some get new work in slaughter houses for chickens. This section is described so vividly that it really makes you want to eat organic. Their work takes them from restaurants in London, care homes near Peterborough, to Sheffield – the city that Andriy has been dreaming of since childhood. All the time on the run from Vulk. And there is a surprising hero.

At the heart of the story is a story of love and protection – how a western leaning city girl can fall for an eastern leaning pro-Russian former miner. Their love deals with things that are far more important than politics, loyalty, friendship and protection. These things are also portrayed as more important than trying to climb up the prosperity ladder whilst leaving their morals behind, as some characters do. Lewycka writes about some quite horrific things – how prostitution can be seen as a step to the better life, the constant fear of escape from that life, the poor conditions for immigrant workers, and the conditions in the chicken-houses for workers and chickens! But all along she makes the narrative bounce along with lightness and humour.

Well worth reading.

Total church (v) – church planting

Continuing the series going through the book, Total Church, by Tim Chester and Steve Timmis.

Chapter 5 of Total church talks about church planting. Chester and Timmis claim that at the centre of the apostolic vision of mission was church planting – this is what Paul and his companions were doing all throughout the New Testament. The church is the agent of mission and as such, church planting is the primary form of mission.

Of course, by church, Chester and Timmis are not talking about the church as an institution of as the universal church. They are talking about the church as a loving and close knit family – as the early church congregations were. The early churches met in households, running a church was compared to running a family. Once this family of the church had outgrown the size of the household that they could meet in, they split into two smaller congregations. (Timmis and Chester giver references for this from Acts).

Local church congregations therefore are to look out and care for each other, to have the gospel at the centre, and are deeply integrated in their local community. Mission and evangelism, then, are part of the DNA of the church as they care for each other and for the community.

Why doesn’t this happen in most churches today? Total church claims there are a number of factors. One is that the church slips into ‘maintenance mode’. As a church gets bigger it starts providing programs and courses and so on, all of these create jobs that need to be filled in the church. The focus of the church then becomes keeping these programs going, rather than reaching out in new ways to the local community.

I guess the main focus of the chapter is simple: that the mission of God involves engaging with the surrounding community and planting communities (church groups) where God’s grace can be lived out and witnessed in the community. Quite simple really.

Total Church (iv) – social involvement

The 4th chapter of Total church concentrates on social involvement. How much should a church be socially involved. Often in the past, doing good works has been seen as an either/or with evangelism.

Tim Chester and Steve Timmis point out that Jesus not only went to the poor and marginalised, he considered them equally worthy to have community with him as anyone else. By sitting and eating with, say, Zacchaeus the tax collected Jesus invited him into him community. The poor don’t just need their lived improved, they need the gospel. Cleaning up someone’s house, for example, is a great example of how communities can love the poor, but this act needs to point to something. Without the gospel of grace it would equally point to a gospel of works or social betterment. This is not the gospel that Jesus taught. All need to hear his words and respond to him in repentance and receive grace. The poor are poor for all sorts of reasons, and very few of them have to do with lack of resources. By introduction to and welcome into an authentic Christian community, they will have the support they need.

However, Christian community has not always been welcoming to the poor. Timmis and Chester are also critical of how churches in the UK (particularly evangelical churches) have traditionally neglected problem areas. The successful ones are full of middle class, upwardly mobile, wealthy people – people just like each other. For some reason, the working classes have not been welcomed or have not felt able to go there. The Christian community was lacking. This, they claim, is not only doing the poor a dis-service, but the rich too, as it communicates a message that Jesus wasn’t teaching – one where status and wealth do matter (even if this is unspoken). The gospel of grace is a gospel for all, rich and poor, and I can’t help thinking we are lacking something of authentic Christian community if we neglect either group.

Total Church (iii) – whole community evangelism

Continuing on their discussion of church being a place where gospel ad community meet, Tim Chester and Steve Timmis move on to talk about evangelism in their book Total Church.

Too often evangelism is seen as something difficult, for individuals to engage in, and as something else that a Christian needs to slot into their life. They argue that if the church took the call to be a radical loving community seriously, this needn’t be the case. People become Christians and start asking questions, they claim, when they see the intersection between faith and the community of faith.

They see a three-strand approach to evangelism: Building relationships, sharing the gospel, and introducing to the community. And, they claim, it doesn’t matter which one comes first. This makes evangelism a role of the whole community, not just of the individual who first meets the seeker.

Some people are simply not good at speaking to strangers and forming new friendships. One of the practical benefits of the three strand model of evangelism is that it gives a role to all of God’s people. By making evangelism a community project, it also takes seriously the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit in distributing a variety of gifts among his people. Everyone has a part to play: the new Christian, the introvert, the extravert, the eloquent, the stuttering, the intelligent, the awkward. I may be the one who has begun to build a relationship with my neighbour, but by introducing him to community, it is someone else who shares the gospel with him. That is not only legitimate; it is positively thrilling!

If this is the model, evangelism does not become an extra thing that an individual needs to do, but it is a gospel intention in the way a community lives out its life. As it goes about what it usually does, inviting people into the community should become second nature.

The Gospels as eyewitness testimony – Richard Bauckham

Richard Bauckham, a professor in theology in Cambridge has written a little booklet on the reliability of the eyewitness accounts of Jesus contained in the gospels, The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony published in the Grove series. It is based on his longer book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. He is primarily writing against form criticism, the predominant method used by some scholars to deconstruct the gospels and test for authenticity. They often hold up a dichotomy between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of Faith” – one can be known from the gospels, but the other cannot. Bauckham reconciles the two by looking for the “Jesus of Testimony” – the Jesus who is described in the gospel by those that were there.

Form criticism relies on the fact that the stories contained in the gospels were handed down through oral tradition – a community telling the stories of Jesus to each other for a few decades until it was eventually handed on to those who wrote them down in the gospels, having forgotten who originally told them. With such an method, adherents of form criticism would say that surely many details got changed or forgotten!

There are many communities that practice handing down stories through oral tradition over several generations, but the early Christian community, Bauckham asserts, was not one of them. The gospels were all written within a few decades (30-40 years) of Jesus’ death, within the lifetimes of people who were there with Jesus. The stories, therefore, never needed to be handed down through many people, but came directly from the eyewitnesses themselves. This adds an authenticity to the stories of Jesus as they came from people who were there at the time (and we often rely on eyewitness accounts to describe details of history now – for example, details of the horrors of the Holocaust are only known through the testimony of survivors).

Bauckham later hypothesises about the inclusion of names of particular minor characters in the gospels, when so many others were left nameless – that these names were pointing to well known Christians who were alive at the time of writing who were the eyewitness source of the event:

Why is it that in Mark’s gospel Jarius and Bartimaus were named, while all other recipients of Jesus’ healings are anonymous (Mark 6:3; 10:46)? Why does Luke, in his narrative of the two disciples who meet the risen Jesus on the way to Emmaus name one of the two (Cleopas) but not the other (Luke 24:18)… The only hypothesis I know that accounts for the evidence is that in most of these cases the names persons became members of the early Christian communities and themselves told the stories in which they appear in the gospels.

One could derive from Bauckham’s conclusion that the Jesus of history can be found through the pages of the four gospels found in the Bible. And once we stop picking him apart we can start to know him as the Christ of Faith.