Hello and welcome to this month's edition of Deep Roots, the Oak Hill podcast,
where we have conversations about theology and ministry.
My name is Tim Ward, and I have the privilege of being one of the lecturers here.
I teach hermeneutics, that's biblical interpretation and word ministry.
My name's Eric Ortland.
I teach Hebrew and Old Testament.
We are very happy to be joined today by our friend and colleague, Andrew.
Andrew, could you introduce yourself?
Tell us what you do at Oak Hill, what you were doing before Oak Hill,
a little bit about yourself.
Sure. I'm Andrew Nicholls, at Marry to Hillary.
We've been here at Oak Hill for four years.
I'm director of pastoral care, which means that I teach pastoral ministry
and I oversee the pastoral care for the college as a whole.
Before coming here, I was in pastoral ministry for 15 years in some different
churches down in southwest London, an Anglican church and a couple of independent
churches, interestingly, which were church plants from the Anglican church.
Well, Andrew, we always begin this out by simply saying, tell us what we're going
to talk about.
Okay, well, here's the thing that has struck me that it would be really helpful
to talk about.
And it's an idea that's been growing in me in part as your action to some of the
really huge stuff that the church has been working through to do with really
really big headlines around culture, abuses of power, styles of leadership and
that kind of thing.
And so that's in the background, but it's not that that I want to talk about.
It's the idea that one of the reasons why that kind of stuff happens may be
because it's relatively hard for little things to go wrong in a way that's
healthy.
I think in part, even to put the sentence like that raises the issue in our minds
that how could something going wrong being healthy be a healthy thing?
Surely a healthy church stuff doesn't go wrong.
And I think that's exactly what I want to invite us to think about and challenge
because I think in a healthy church, little stuff needs to be going wrong all
the time.
And I don't just mean the kind of the tech stuff, the PowerPoint slides
changing at just the wrong time, if you were going to sing the next verse at
the right time.
And obviously there's a point in which that kind of thing can just be irritating
and helpful and it's great to continue to work at it.
But I think I mean things like this week has been a really tough week in our
marriage and it's okay for me to be able to say that to somebody.
Or I really found last week's sermon difficult to hear.
And I don't know if you meant that.
And not because of my hearing aids.
Yeah, that's right.
That's right.
It'll be fine.
And perhaps particularly because of the kind of huge sensitivity that we now
have about how well our leaders are doing.
And those are such important questions to ask.
Nothing in me is saying let's not talk about that.
But it means that any kind of discussion in that area feels like it's pushing
that button and we need to try and find a way to say, yeah, that wasn't great.
And I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
And thank you for pointing it out.
And I need you.
And I hope we can do better next time.
Without it mushrooming into a major moral issue or something.
That's right.
It's a training session by Lisa Oakley recently, and she's done a lot of work in
spiritual abuse.
And I found this a very helpful model.
She describes four circles to describe the kinds of things that are going on in church.
The first one is healthy.
The next one is unhelpful.
The next one is unhealthy.
And the last one is abusive.
And she was saying that health is great.
Hopefully we know what that is.
The next one is unhelpful.
And that happens all the time.
That's a normal thing.
It's a valuable thing in part because to recognise what's going wrong helps you come
back to healthy and avoid being unhealthy.
But even if it's unhealthy, it's really important to have a discussion about it, to recognise
it and put it right.
And those both become important ways in which you don't get the kind of the drift towards
things which can only be addressed because they become a crisis.
Would it be important to set some boundaries here in terms of...
The examples you listed were relatively small.
Yeah.
I found last week's sermon really difficult to listen to as opposed to I just don't like
the preaching in this church or something like that.
Oh.
Would that be helpful to say upfront that what we're talking about is small bumps in
the road along the way, the addressing of which can really help the culture of a church?
Yes, exactly.
So I think the motivation in raising them needs to be positive.
I'm not trying to do you down.
I care about church.
I assume we care about church together.
We want to...
Let's have a constructive conversation about these things.
Let me come at it from a slightly different angle maybe.
A friend of mine talks about the car park conversion that Christians experience on their
way into church every week.
They've had a nightmare argument at home.
They park the car.
I mean, assuming you have a car park, they get off the bus, whatever it is.
And as they come into the door, they're all smiles.
Everybody behaves.
The answer to the question, how are you, is I'm fine, not...
We've just had a blazing row.
I'm not ready to listen to anything kind of thing.
And I think the kinds of issues I'm raising here are the same kinds of issues.
Can I come to church if I've had a really bad morning?
Is this a church that connects with people who are finding life difficult?
And relatedly, sometimes there's a prayer which is incredibly well-meaning.
Lord, please help us to leave behind the troubles of the week that we can focus on you.
And a big part of me, this is not my original idea, a big part of me wants to change that.
So let's never pray that for a time anyway.
Let's pray.
Dear Lord, please help us to bring all the things of the week in, to hear your grace,
to have help from your people, and to make sure that everything that we're doing here
in church is connecting with life as I'm really living it.
I'm going to be going out there to live it again tomorrow.
And my children are still going to be my children.
My wife is still going to be my wife.
And my challenges at work are still going to be my challenges at work, my experience
of redundancy, and all those things that are asking huge questions of me during the week
need to be part of my engagement and relationships in church.
Let me just check.
I'm hearing you right.
I think I'm hearing you talk about two related things, but they're slightly different.
One of them is a culture, they're both to do with a culture in a particular church family.
One is a culture where members of the church, people who come, have permission to say constructively
critical things about the ministry they're receiving from their elders and their leaders.
And the other one is a culture in which everybody in the church family, perhaps particularly
the elders and leaders, again, have permission to be honest about how things are going in
their lives when they're not going well.
Have I got it right?
It's those two kinds of things.
Yes, absolutely.
And I think they're linked because elders and leaders need to lead in this.
It's often said, I think, rightly, that in a sense, a pastor needs to be the chief repenter.
And that doesn't just mean that they say louder than it'd be, I'm a terrible sinner.
It means that we hear a little bit of the detail in their life that puts color and shade
into what aspect of that is in their life right now.
I can't help myself having a... clearly I'm with you.
You're describing the kind of church that I would always want to be part of.
And if I'm leading, I will always want to lead.
I mean, this is slightly provocative, but just to kind of crack one of those open a
little bit.
I've been a pastor for a number of years, as you have.
Critical emails come in pretty regularly.
All sorts of flak is coming your way all the time.
Not to me.
No, yes, it was.
Oh, no, I heard you were the perfect one.
I could imagine a pastor hearing that around, let's foster and create a culture where criticism
is encouraged of the ministry.
An issue reaction being, oh my goodness, I seem to spend most of my time wanting to stop
a culture of criticism because I just get flak thrown at me all the time.
Now, look, I know you're not necessarily talking about that, but could you just sort of tease
that out a little bit?
So what are you talking about?
What are you not talking about?
I'm sure that part of what a good leader has to do sometimes is be willing to identify
a divisive spirit, a person who is pushing for their own agenda, a person who... the
effect of their input keeps being damaging rather than constructive.
We have to be willing to identify those people.
The Bible uses different words for them.
Avoid divisive people.
Don't get involved in gossip, that kind of conversation.
And even somewhere down that path, people turn into wolves and those who want to tear
churches apart and so on and really just have their own agenda run all the time.
So yes, this is not saying any criticism that I can possibly think of is instantly given
infallible status, but it's saying that the leaders are articulating and demonstrating
that they know they are people who are not only capable of making a mistake in theory,
but are making mistakes all the time.
We can't avoid that.
We're not in the new creation yet.
We remain sinful people and that comes out in the words that I say in a church meeting.
It comes out in the conversation that was overheard and shouldn't have been.
It comes out in all kinds of ways and a little bit of detail that you can't share everything
and one of the things we need to grow in wisdom is what are the kinds of things you can share.
But a little bit of detail so that it's evident that people who are leading, people on the
stage, people behind the microphone are willing to lead in this respect.
One thing that can help develop that different culture is a kind of dual expectation and
it's okay for the other person to say, you know, my brother or sister, I love you.
It's really not a helpful thing to say for these reasons.
Maybe they're reasons you don't know.
Maybe they do know, but here's why, you know, I can't take that on board and that's okay
to say as well.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
Let me mention another possible benefit and it's something that we've talked a little
bit about.
I teach pastoral ministry, but I occasionally guest in other modules and it's very grand,
isn't it?
But I teach in the ethics module on the issue of abortion and one of the things that I say
there, I share my conviction that every church member should know some basic stats about
abortion and one of those is that one in three women in England and Wales has an abortion,
one in three, one in 30.
Now, many of the women in our churches must therefore have had an abortion.
It may not be close to one in three.
It may be much closer than we can know, but where is the context in church where someone
with that in their past, knowing something of what many people in the church might think
about the wrongness of an abortion, where is the place that that could ever be talked
about?
And one of the problems with church looking quite polished and the people of church looking
really quite okay is that someone like that is either going to believe that they don't
belong in the church or that this bit of their life doesn't belong in church and so they
become in some sense split.
There are places where they're real, but they're not in church.
And so one of the things we discuss in that lecture with those students is if no one in
the church can know that you've occasionally lost it with your children, how can someone
share that they've done something that they in their own minds feels unimaginably worse
than that?
It seems like there are two aspects to this.
Tim, tell me what you think as well, both repeatedly, emphatically saying from the front,
from the pastor and other leaders, it's the kind of church we are, inviting this sort
of openness.
The two aspects you mentioned, Tim, the personal openness and the willingness to say this isn't
helpful.
And then both the leadership and individuals in the church taking the plunge and being
vulnerable and saying, this is who I really am.
And it's been my experience that can have a wonderful sort of sparking effect where
other people could say, oh, I can just saying that may not be enough for a lot of people
in the church to really start to open up.
But when they see someone else doing it's much easier to follow up.
Does that seem right?
Absolutely seems right to me.
And I and I've noticed that and I felt it and I've enjoyed it and I've relaxed and I've
changed the way I speak when I'm when I'm led in those kinds of ways.
I've experienced that and it's a wonderful thing.
I've also experienced it in a personal conversation.
It doesn't have to be all up front, all on a stage.
But if if when you have those moments with a leader, you find that they are wanting to
be honest with you about what's hard in their life, it's transformative that in the way
you open up to them.
And again, there's a there's a carefulness about who and how you share.
But and which particular issues you say with which particular people and all kinds of reasons
for that, but that principle that the pastor clearly knows they're not perfect.
The leader, the leaders, the elders are not obviously trying to live a polished life in
front of people, but a real life that needs grace.
Because this is the this is this is what we then open ourselves to enjoy, it seems to
me, is is the grace of God that he shares with us.
And we then learn to share with one another, it transforms it deepens our relationships.
We grow in our sense of love.
One of the one of the most explicit verses that deals with this kind of territory in
James Jackson five, which talks about confessing our sins to one another, he may be healed.
It's a it's a controversial verse for all kinds of reasons.
But within the context of the letter as a whole, the letter as a whole is returning to
this issue of double mindedness and the idea of living one foot in the world and one foot
in the church, one foot in in looking to God for blessing and one foot in looking to other
things for blessing and and that and and then as he draws towards a conclusion in chapter
five seems to me he's saying, do you know this is true of you?
If it is, tell somebody, confess your sins, that you may be healed that you and and by
implication others in the church, the church grows out of our incipient double mindedness
in our understanding of grace, because the wonderful thing about James is alongside these
very pungent commands to stop being double minded is the promise of the grace of God
who draws close to us and amazingly draws close to us.
The more real we are with him about our sin, the closer he comes to us.
And that's extraordinary and wonderful to experience.
It's a wonderful picture of church life you're painting.
And when I mean, anybody who's experienced it or church will always be imperfect on this.
And if if you're a member of a church or a leader of a church where this is what folks
are aiming at, you're absolutely right.
That's a wonderful thing.
I'd just like to dig in a little bit or encourage you to help encourage you to dig in for us.
I doubt that anybody hearing this kind of thing is going to think no, that this is not
describing the kind of church I ever want to lead or be a member of.
We're describing a church that virtually everybody's going to find attractive.
So my hunch is if this doesn't happen, it probably won't be because the leaders in theory
don't want it.
Right.
There may be some who just know, no, I'm never going to know.
Probably most people hearing it would think, yes, I want to belong to or lead a church
that's like this, which must mean I think that when it doesn't happen, it won't be for
lack of intention.
It'll be because there are barriers and blockages that we are blind to.
What might some of those be?
Well, I'm not disagreeing with you.
I think you're right that most people do.
And yet sometimes we are holding incompatible ideals.
So the ideal of strong leadership or even just leadership kind of implies a kind of
greatness, you know, and the idea, which is a very biblical idea, that the pastor, the
elders, the senior leaders in any ministry within the youth work or women's ministry,
wherever it might be, are an example to the flock.
That is critically important, obviously.
Follow me as I follow Christ.
Exactly.
That doesn't mean that the only things in which I get to set an example of things that
I do right, because watch your life and doctrine closely, persevere in them.
If you do, you'll save your both and your hearers.
But people have to see your progress.
And that implies that they see that you're not there yet.
So leading for Timothy, as Paul instructed Timothy, was to allow people to see him grow,
grow in understanding and doctrine and grow in the godliness of his life.
And again, so I think there's that barrier, which is the idea that being an example means
I've arrived when really it means I need to let people see that I'm in need of growth.
I think experiences of trying and it going badly are another barrier.
So if you try to be vulnerable, and there's some person in the congregation who takes
advantage of it, or who reminds you of it, or who sort of has an aha moment with you,
I knew you were, you know, I mean, some of us have been there, it's a very painful wound.
And we need the grace of God to heal that and enable us to try again with somebody else
in a different context rather than just to scar up and cover over.
And I think, well, God is there to help us in just that way, I think, to be the safe
place that others were not.
We can go to him as a refuge, go to him with our sin, crawl back under his wings, know
the safety of his love, and then come out again and have another go at trying to enter
and leave the church.
One of the things that I really felt moving out of being a pastor into theological education
was that, I mean, it's kind of obvious, but I really felt it's suddenly now being a theological
educator and going to work and coming home from work meant that work was really work
and life was really life.
Of course, for many people when they're in church ministry, maybe pastoring a church,
work and life are completely interlinked and you can't entirely tease them apart.
And I think to the looking back, as it were, if someone criticizes something I do here
at college, oh, that was a bad lecture, or that was a bad decision you made in that responsibility
you were given, that'll hurt a little bit, but I can basically go home and say, well,
I have my life and that doesn't affect it.
Any criticism of me or perceived shortcoming in me, whether it be as a Christian or a pastor,
when I'm a pastor, suddenly now you criticize one part, you're just sticking the knife into
the hole of me.
And if I'm someone who, I'm sure I am, who would just hold a ridiculous level of pride
in being perceived by others to be good at my job, if my job and my life are utterly
combined.
Yeah, that's got to be right.
And so, flip it around, pastors therefore have an acute awareness of their need of God
as the place to take these things.
And actually, if we can learn to do that more and more, learn to find our identity, and
you know, these are not small words, and it is an area in which we need to grow.
And I felt exactly the same thing as you, by the way, giving up being a pastor and coming
here.
One of the ways in which we need to grow, I think, is our ability to take these things
to the Lord.
And when Christ calls us to follow him and take up our cross, part of what that means,
take up our cross daily, in one of the gospels, means a willingness to die for him.
And therefore, we must go to him for the grace to die for him each day.
And do I do that consistently?
No.
But the Lord in his kindness brings opportunities to me to have another go at dying for him
in a day.
And I think one of the ways in which we do that is precisely this kind of, I can't do
this.
I'm not up to this.
I want to give up.
Very early on in my ministry, I was having a little moan at somebody about being generally
rubbish.
And he heard quite accurately a note in me of defeat and give up.
He said, now, come on, brother, we don't give up.
And what he, I mean, he was quite right.
Because what I needed to hear, we keep going back to Christ to find our hope, our forgiveness,
our strength.
And the NF is part of the dynamic out of which we minister to others.
So criticism gets woven in.
And the handling of things as a pastor can leave me feeling no one is like me.
But it can also be the opportunity in which I discover the very things and ways in which
we are like everybody else.
Is it?
So can I just have one more go at this?
Is this where the this well the well-worn territory of the professionalization of ministry?
Does this does this play in here?
Because I think you again, just autobiographically, but I doubt I'm unique in this.
You know, I'm going to I am the kind of person who's always going to cherish the thought
that whatever working life I would have chosen, I would be really competent at it.
And everybody around me would be grateful that although it's not perfect, everyone would
recognize he's really calm.
Whatever line of work I would have been competent at.
I'd love to hear more about what some of those lines of work might have been to him.
Well, the world of professional golf lost out.
That was a joke.
I was thinking Bob Dylan impersonator.
Whatever.
Yeah, he's possibly the one professional singer who sings worse than I do.
And for as long as I cherish that somehow in my mind, I'm always going to think I was
going to act like there will be some aspect of being a pastor, being in church leadership,
which has got to be some area where even though I don't want this psychologically, I'm going
to treat it like I'm a professional.
This is a job I do.
I am pretty good at it, I think.
And you all have got to agree that I'm really good at this.
And I'm just going to sort of ring fence that.
And I may in the pulpit give myself as an example of failing in godliness.
But I have this over here.
I have this over here.
I'm still good at that.
And if you all in the church could see this, you would be grateful for what a great pastor
I wrote.
And as long as I'm ring fencing that, I'm probably not doing what you're recommending.
Is this just me?
Is this ringing any bells?
It's his ringing bells.
So, is one part of being a pastor resolving to do it, resolving to die daily to the thought
that I will be perceived as good at my job.
And I just have to accept and resign myself to not being a professional.
In the second Corinthians, Paul will talk about the mockery, the shame, the insults.
No one looks at any part of Paul, this magnificently talented relational man and says, oh, that
is so magnificent.
You are so talented.
He is an object of mockery and Tim, as you very well articulated, not having any part
of your life you can hold on to where everyone says, oh, they're great at that, even if you
are.
Yeah.
I'm sure that's right.
I know the tendency to think, oh, but at least I have this or I have that.
And I might do it in a kind of diary thing, you know, at least this went really badly,
but at least I've got this other thing coming up or whatever it is.
And I guess as I grow more as a Christian, my instinct will be to say more, at least
I have Jesus and he is enough.
He is the place I go to for that kind of sense of comfort or reassurance or, you know, if
I could grow in that, that would be a lovely thing.
Andrew, two questions for you.
Yeah.
I was thinking as Tim, as you were talking, that maybe one help in all of this is recognizing
and accepting that most of us will really not be good at this.
Yeah.
We're going to be clumsy.
We'll keep trying anyway to be vulnerable.
But let's say someone listening is a new pastor in a church and the church has a church culture
very tightly regimented, controlled, ratcheted down, vulnerability was punished.
What can the pastor do with their staff and with their congregation to help change that
culture slowly but perceptibly?
Second question.
That's a great question.
Hopefully we can forget it while we listen to the second question.
Well, well, I don't know.
Christians come in two types, I think.
Tim Keller talks in his book on the prodigal son, you have the prodigals and you have the
older brothers who get straight A's and never, you know, Paul says in Galatians two, we're
not Gentile sinners.
He was an upright, upstanding man.
Yeah.
And we have people that the sincere born again Christians in the church who, when they hear
someone get really vulnerable without meaning to, but in a way that damages the other person
become morally outraged and they feel it's their part as a Christian to persecute a person
who's being vulnerable and they can't see that that's a violation of grace.
We all know those people who are just such admirable Christians.
Well, at least I do.
Such admirable Christians.
You can see God's blessing on their lives in many ways, but I just sort of think I would
never confess a sin to you.
I know it would not be okay.
We can be friends, but I can't quite be that vulnerable.
Probably every church has older brothers like that.
What do you do as a church starts to open up and someone reacts badly, but with the
best of intentions?
That is a magnificent question and I have indeed forgotten the first question.
We'll go with the second question first.
Second question.
I wasn't trying to forget it.
It just struck me as difficult and I was listening so carefully to the second.
Yeah, I mean, I am an older brother, aren't I?
From I'm an am actually as a matter of fact, but the ability to focus on something other
than the extraordinary grace of God, arguably he had a point that his day to day relationship
with his father had been more about doing the right thing.
And he had been unaware of how lavish the father's love for him was.
And in the story, as Jesus tells it in order to explain why he spends so much time with
tax collectors and sinners who desperately need forgiveness.
You know, it is to wake us up to the lavish extraordinary grace of God that we might enjoy
it more.
We might come in and share the party with him.
And I suppose therefore that what is a pastor do?
Make a point of drawing attention to the grace of God over and over and over again.
And occasionally come alongside an older brother and say, how are you enjoying the party?
In a kind of a way.
Not not as tritely as that but in a serious, meaningful conversation about things that
are on this particular older brother's heart, hear them well, and invite them in to the
party.
Perhaps we need to talk about, for example, think about what that was that will be like.
But I suppose I'm thinking of a
Because that's exactly what Jesus does.
He's inviting the older brother.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, to the party, the father in the parable.
Yeah, but sorry, go ahead, Andrew.
Yeah.
And you never quite get to know in the parable whether they come in.
And it's true.
The fact that such people are around is not a surprise.
And we can't write the script for the end for much as we might like to.
But you know, that story is a very powerful demonstration of the direction which God wants
to lead his people.
So we pray and we ask the Great Shepherd to keep drawing people to his grace.
And yeah, we're not very good at it.
But he's pretty good at it.
And yeah, in the end, he'll have to pass these people.
I'll quote Tim Keller again, did Keller will say you need to do apologetics with Christians
in the public, which I think is true, it may be helpful for pastors to remember your your
preaching to younger brothers and older brothers, your preaching to Pharisees, born again, Christians
who have utterly clear consciences about themselves.
And when they hear about young married grace, mercy and forgiveness of God, they think,
oh, yeah, that's great.
I'm okay.
We talk about something else, you know, but how I'd be interested to hear from you as
well, Tim, let's say a church was schooled in very regimented non vulnerability as godliness.
What can a pastor do with their staff and with the body as a whole to help incrementally
but but noticeably change the culture to a gospel culture?
I'd also have to know what let me give an example that I've sometimes used a couple
of times.
I helped to write this this course, which is based on wonderful stuff I'd learned from
from David Powelson and others.
And he helped us write this course called Real Change, which lots of people have have
used and enjoyed.
And occasionally, because I, my name is on the cover, I get invited to go through the
material over a church weekend.
And in setting those weekends up, I've sort of tried to say, I'm going to get people talking
in small groups about stuff that isn't going great in their lives.
And sometimes in that conversation, there's a nervousness about, I'm not sure how well
that's going to go.
I'm not sure we do that particularly.
And because I've done it a few times now, I'm able to be quite reassuring and say, look,
I think it'll be fine.
And what I do at the beginning of that, quite apart from helping people see promises of
God that secure our safety and promises work in our lives, I just tell a story of my own
stupidity.
I talk about taking out the recycling.
And I've done this at college as well.
I'm carrying recycling, create the lemonade bottle, falls off.
I've heard it three times.
And I'm looking forward to the fourth time next year.
It's a great story.
And I just find myself and shouting at the lemonade bottle falling on the floor and getting
really annoyed.
And I'm also conscious that I'm getting annoyed at whoever put it on the crate, the fact that
I'm the only person that ever ever empties the recycling and that bottles don't stay
where I put them first time.
And actually that gets to a level of stupidity because I realize that I am treating myself
as if I am the kind of being that should be able to do whatever they want to do, however
ridiculous the attempt first time.
And that really is to take God on.
And so I want to be like you.
He's the only one who gets to do exactly what he wants first time.
And I am not.
And in his great kindness, he won't let me become that kind of creature because then
I would think I was God.
And just the falling lemonade bottle says you are subject to the laws of nature.
I am not.
You are an idiot for getting.
Now I say that to myself, I don't think God speaks to me like that except full of love.
And it turns out if you share that example with a room full of people you've never met,
they've all got an example of exactly the same thing in their own lives.
And even if this is a church which hasn't been into this kind of conversation at all,
because I'm laughing at myself and they're laughing at me and quite right too, and because
it's it's a it's a kind of 30 seconds that we all recognize for our own lives and we're
all happy to say, yes, this all happens to all of us.
But then to be able to say actually in this kind of very ordinary way, which is unthreatening,
we're doing something very significant in our relationship with God.
And we need his grace for that relationship.
The weekend starts well.
And people buzz with their kind of enjoyment of being able to have these conversations
about real life.
So that's one of the ways that I would say it.
That's an example of vulnerability, which both feels trivial and significant.
Tim, what would you do if you were a pastor for church and you you wanted to change the
culture?
What sorts of things would you do?
I agree with what Andrew says.
I think I'd want to start being open about my own.
I mean, you're talking about about my own spiritual failings about how being very clear,
I'm a spiritual work in progress.
You know, live with me as I progress.
So I hope I'll be a more godly pastor for you than I am in 10 years time.
Fine.
And I think that's right.
I mean, if a church is really kind of bottom down, it can be quite a step from, OK, shall
we just now start being open about our struggles in life and our spiritual failings?
You want to get there.
One thing that occurs to me, and as you mentioned, the staff team, maybe if the church is big
enough to have a staff team, one place it starts maybe is just being openly relaxed.
About things going wrong in the life of the church.
I mean, Andrew, right at the beginning, you mentioned, you know, the PowerPoint's not
working for the songs or whatever it is.
And that wasn't and you want to talk about deeper things than that.
And that's of course, right.
But maybe one step towards people being open with what's going wrong personally in their
lives and in their life in Christ could just be we are wonderfully relaxed and forgiving
about when someone messes up.
You know, it's that, you know, if I'm the pastor at the front leading the service and
the person running the AV didn't show up 30 minutes before the service, but five minutes
before the service, and this service is going to look incompetent to many of the people
there.
And I might.
And what's going on in my head is consciously or subconsciously, I'm going to look incompetent
because he felled up because he couldn't get out of bed in time.
What how do I then respond?
It's in those it's in those moments.
I hope I've been shaped to be in this by the example I had in the past.
I was a junior member, a junior member of a staff team of a church and the senior leader
of the church, at least as I experienced him, was exemplary in this.
He seemed to me to be omni competent and he would delegate jobs to people of the staff
team and you do the job as best you could.
And probably there were times people give jobs which he could have done better himself.
And my experience was that he when things went well, he publicly praised the person
who led the ministry when things didn't go so well.
He took the flak publicly.
That was my experience of serving with him.
And just that openness of it didn't go well.
There you go.
God's sovereign.
We're not omni competent.
Just to find out, I was hearing recently of someone who leads the music ministry in a
particular church and this person is a massively talented, hyper trained musician, could be
a professional musician.
You know, and they spend a lot of time with a bunch of amateurs who show up late.
And the description that someone who's in the music team here gave me of this ministry
was, he sets really high standards, really pushes people to be the best they can.
And then when they foul up a bit and don't quite play it right in the service itself,
he's totally relaxed and laughs with them about the mistakes afterwards.
And it doesn't matter.
And that seems to be an example of, let's be the best we can for the Lord.
But I just want to set an example of, I don't have such an inflated view of myself that
if you make me look bad, I don't care.
I don't care.
And God has a wonderful track record of doing great things out of foul ups.
And I think I might just stop when things go wrong in the church.
We're just going to laugh and we'll pray that God will bring good things out of it.
I hope that no one listening thinks we're just talking about applying the gospel.
We are talking about that, but it's something more.
It's a pervasive atmosphere that colors every service and every relationship.
That is the atmosphere of heaven itself and the heart of God for his people.
And it's so much more than just applying God's grace or something like that.
Culture is the sort of thing that is everywhere present.
And we feel and taste and smell it all the time, but it's very difficult to define precisely
or quite put your finger on, but it's always there.
And small but incremental changes can just have massive ripple effects in terms of what
it's like to be in the building with these other Christians in the most beautiful ways.
Exactly right.
And that's a really helpful thing to hold onto.
I think perhaps I have at least partially remembered your first question, which is about
what if church has been really straight jacketed into invulnerability?
And I think one thing to seek God's grace to avoid is to be cross with them.
If you're trying to lead them into something different, it's incredibly easy to get that
way.
But as you just said, Tim, the kind of irritation that may be as closely related to a sense
of my failure as a pastor than genuine desire to know that whole streams of psychotherapy
are built on the idea that we are simply the product of our upbringing.
And it's easy in wanting to disagree with that, to lose the idea that a very large part
of who we are is a result of our upbringing and the way we were taught to live and what
we thought church should be and how you're supposed to get converted in the car park
on your way into church.
And it takes a lot if someone's lived in that kind of church for 30 years, they're not suddenly
going to they might see something they like about a pastor who speaks differently.
But they might not have a clue how that would have any connection with the way they answer
the question when they arrive in church.
You've got to be willing to be in it for the long haul and you genuinely got to seek the
grace of God to respond with that servant heart, however far you get in however long
you've been there.
And you may need to be willing to lose church members don't want to go to church that has
that kind of vulnerability.
Yeah, do not want that.
Yeah.
This has been a tremendous discussion.
I've lost track of the time.
I'm just going to ask John, our tech guy, John, how long have we been going for?
40 minutes.
So we got a couple more minutes if we need them for folks watching and listening.
That was just a little break in the fourth.
What's going on behind the experts behind the exactly.
That's right.
I said, John, it's actually John and John, John and Jonathan.
Anyway, Andrew, any last couple of minutes, any ways in which you just like to land this
for us things we have to address?
Do you think we need to ways of grounding it?
Well, one way would be, I suppose, to look for a lemonade bottle in your own life.
I can put it that way.
What's the thing that you're going to find yourself doing at the next 24 hours, 36 hours,
48 hours that is just a normal part of life?
But if you were able to stand back and stop and think about you say, that's odd in someone
who thinks what I think about the sovereignty of God or the grace of God or whatever it
is, you know, that doesn't really make sense.
And a little thing like that that you could share with one other person.
It just reveals the depth reveals the depth of ongoing sin in our lives.
Yes.
So I wasn't really going for that.
I suppose I was just going for the existence of.
Okay.
You know, that in in I've if you were to say to me what what does it look like in your
life at the moment that I'd have something to say?
Yeah.
And I think to know what that is and to talk about that with the Lord and then to find
one other person to begin talking about that.
That would be a really good way to begin landing this and see how it feels and choose that
person well and choose someone else and see how that goes.
Thank you so much for being with us, Andrew.
This has been superb.
Great to talk to you guys.
It's a powerful things.
Actually, I tell you what, I don't think we've ended with prayer before, but it feels like
that would be really good to do.
I need prayer in this.
We'll do folks listening, watching in.
Well, Andrew, could you pray for us always?
Yeah, I'd love to.
I'd if I thank you so much for your grace, which is so much more wonderful than we are
usually aware of.
And thank you for those moments when you break in and you surprise us again with the reality
that your arms are wide open.
You've you've run out of the house towards us.
You've prepared an amazing party for us that being recipients of your grace, being people
that you love is just so much more wonderful than we imagined.
And I pray we'd be willing to see something of the sin in our own lives, that you'd reveal
that to us in order that we may find your grace more, more lovely and more sweet and
more precious and more worth sharing so that we might be willing to speak about the things
in our own lives, not because we're great examples of knowing what's wrong in our own
lives, but because we have a great God who's just so kind to us.
And I pray that this kind of way of thinking and loving and so on could bear root in my
heart and in Tim's heart and in Eric's heart and in all our hearts because we need you
and we need to be willing to be people who say that we need you because we know it's
true and we're aware of that need in every moment, not just for occasional big things,
but in every moment of our lives.
Thank you that this is exactly the work that your spirit is at work to do and that we have
every hope that tomorrow we'll have progressed in these things more than we have today.
In Jesus' name we pray.
Amen.