Through Painted Deserts

Donald Miller

I tend to think life is about security, that when you have a full year’s rent, you can rest. I worry about things too much, I worry about whether or not my ideas are right, I worry about whether or not people like me, I worry about whether or not I am going to get married, and then I worry about whether or not my girl will leave me if I do get married.

Lately I found myself worrying about whether or not my car was fashionable, whether I sounded like an idiot when I spoke in public, whether or not my hair was going to fall out, and all of it, perhaps because I bought into Houston, one thousand square miles of concrete and strip malls and megachurches and cineplexes, none of it real. I mean it is there, it is made of matter, but it is all hype. None of the messages are true or have anything to do with the fact we are spinning around on a planet in a galaxy set somewhere in a cosmos that doesn’t have any edges to it. There doesn’t seem to be any science saying any of this ‘stuff’ matters at all. But it feels like ‘it’ matters, whatever ‘it’ is; it feels like we are supposed to be panicking about things.

I remember driving down I-45 a few months ago and suddenly realising the number of signs that were screaming at me, signs wanting me to buy waterbeds, signs wanting me to watch girls take off their clothes, signs wanting me to eat Mexican food, to eat barbeque, backlit, scrolling signs wanting me to come to church, to join this gym, to see this movie, to finance a car, even if I have no money. And it hit me that amid the screaming noise, amid the messages that said buy this product and I will be made complete, I could hardly know the life that life was meant to be.

….We stood out in the desert this morning, and the chemicals in my brain poured soothingly through the grey matter, as if to massage with fingers the most tender part of my mind, as if to say, this is what a human is supposed to feel. This is what we were made for, to watch the beauty of light fill up the earth’s canvas, to make dirt come alive; like fairy dust, making trees and cacti and humans from the magic of its propulsion. It makes me wonder, now, how easily the brain can be tricked out of what it was supposed to feel, how easily the brain can be tricked by somebody who has a used car to sell, a new perfume, whatever. ‘You will feel what you were made to feel if you buy this thing I am selling.’

But could the thing you and I were supposed to feel, the thing you and I were supposed to be, cost nothing? Paul [my friend] seems to think so, or at least he acts as if this is true. He doesn’t want to stay in a hotel room and catch up on the news. He doesn’t want to rifle through the sports pages and make sure the team he has associated his ego with is doing well. I don’t think he is trying to win anything at all. I just think he is trying to feel what a human is supposed to feel when he stops believing lies.

And maybe when a person doesn’t buy the lies anymore, when a human stops long enough to realise the stuff people say to get us to part with our money often isn’t true, we can finally see the sunrise, smell the wetness in a Gulf breeze, stand in awe at a downpour no less magnificent than a twenty-thousand-foot waterfall, wonder at the physics of a duck paddling itself across the surface of a pond, enjoy the reflection of the sun on the face of the moon, and know ‘This is what I was made to do. This is who I was made to be,’ that life is being given to me as a gift, that light is a metaphor, and God is doing these things to dazzle us.

From chapter 7 of Through Painted Deserts – light, God and beauty on the open road, published by Nelson 2005 [This book is a slightly revised edition of Miller’s first book: Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance. ]

The Narnian

Alan Jacobs

Armed with this sound theology of pleasure, Lewis’s perpetual task both as a defender of Christianity and as an advocate of medieval literature is to call people to delight – and delight even in old books. Yes, those were written by people different than ourselves – but not radically different. They are still recognisably human; they inhabit a world that is sometimes strange to us but not wholly alien. In fact, they are just different enough to be valuable to us as instructors in virtues we have neglected. We cannot go back in time and teach them to be more compassionate, but if we read them with care and sympathy they can instruct us in courage and chastity. We will not, however, read them with care and sympathy unless there is some reward for us in it: it is for this reason that Lewis emphasises the delight that can come from them. He wants us to know that it is indeed possible for a twentieth-century man to enjoy reading four-hundred-year-old books just for the sheer pleasure of it. And any book that delights us may more readily teach us its wisdom.

In The Lord of the Rings, the wise and ancient Elf Celeborn counsels the Company, in response to a gibe from Boromir about "old wives’ tales," "Do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years; for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that were once needful for the wise to know." Several of the plots of the Narnia books turn on the forgetting of the old lore by some and its remembering by others. In Prince Caspian, Doctor Cornelius, Caspian’s tutor, is primarily a historian, and his passionate remembrance of ‘Old Narnia’ – "my old heart has carried these secret memories so long that it aches with them" – is key to the return of the Talking Beasts and the restoration of the great kingdom that Caspian’s Telmarine ancestors ruined. The confusion and discord sown by Shift and Ape in The Last Battle is possible because Aslan is only a name to the people of Narnia: they know nothing of his history, or of his character, so they can easily be made to believe that he has commanded deeds (for instance, the destruction of the forest) that are incompatible with his care for Narnia.

Among the ‘old lore’ of our world there is one tradition that Lewis found especially fascinating, and that turns up repeatedly in his fiction. Most of us have heard the phrase ‘the music of the spheres’ - the spheres being, in medieval astronomy, the abodes of the planets. These spheres surround the earth, moving outward from us in concentric circles; beyond them is the Empyrean, the Heaven of Heavens, where God’s presence dwells most fully. But what is their ‘music?’ That music is made by the friction of their contact as they ceremoniously rotate at their various speeds: it is of extraordinary beauty, and the contrasting stillness of the Earth is ‘the point at which all the light, heat and movement descending from the nobler spheres finally died out into darkness, coldness and passivity.’ But what makes the spheres move? That is the task of their governing spirits: ‘Each sphere, or something resident in each sphere, is a conscious and intellectual being, moved by the ‘intellectual love of God…These lofty creatures are called Intelligences.’ It was usually thought that an Intelligence was a very particular kind of angel – a ‘creature,’ but not embodied, and with the single function of being the mover of the sphere.

These are the Oyarsa of Lewis’s space trilogy…

From chapter 8 of The Narnian – the life and imagination of C S Lewis, published by HarperSanFrancisco 2005

The Bible or the Axe

William O Levi

Shari’a came suddenly, though not unexpectedly. One day we had some illusion of freedom, and the next day we had none. It was almost funny how the new military leadership put a positive spin on the whole thing. They accused the Christian leaders from the free government of being ‘soft on crime.’ The Shari’a, they explained, would rid the people of the scourges of alcohol, prostitution, immorality, and all sorts of petty crimes. Christians, they insisted, were hypocrites who failed to enforce the moral code that they claimed to believe in.
The fundamental principle of Shari’a is that freedom disturbs the moral order and fosters crimes against Islam Therefore, freedom must be ended, along with the permissive Christian philosophy of government. And both were summarily eliminated.

It didn’t take long to see the results of Shari’a. There was a sudden rise in the number of amputees, as petty thievery was met with machete justice. A man’s hand for a loaf of bread seemed a price too high to pay. But who would dare to say so? The pain of the new law was felt by Muslims and Christians alike. Most of the Muslims [in the Sudan] were moderates who didn’t particularly welcome the religious police into their lives. But they were cowed by the pressure to conform to the Shari’a, because the edicts came from their own mosques. At least the Christians had some reason to expect that some of the laws would not apply to them.

Through the early days of the Shari’a, Pastor Ben kept up his evangelistic efforts. He had developed a program of street preaching that he took to down-town Juba’s business district. People from the congregation would accompany him to a street corner, singing songs in Arabic and attracting groups of onlookers. After the singing, Pastor Ben would deliver a gospel message and an invitation to attend the local church. It was a popular ministry, and I enjoyed going along and singing songs for the people who stopped to listen. But it soon became apparent that the military rulers were going to apply the law across the board, and we found that we were bound by the rules of the religious police just as our Muslim friends and neighbours were. We realised that we would be forced to protest the Shari’a if we hoped to retain some measure of our religious freedom

But protest was a dangerous thing.

From chapter 9 of The Bible or the Axe – one man’s dramatic escape from persecution in the Sudan, published by Moody Press 2005

Testimony

Thomas G Long

We cannot live without trustworthy words, cannot be human without them. If at least some words cannot be relied on, we have no way of knowing who we are, cannot build relationships of love, and are unable to make even the most modest plans for how we shall live. So no matter how many times we get knocked over by half-truths and wholesale lies, we get right back up for the next round. If Christians commit to telling the truth, then, they are not just being nice people. They are using words in the way human beings most need to hear them.

Making the point that everyday life depends on the reliability and truthfulness of words, the philosopher C A J Coady imagines the he is travelling to a foreign city, say, Amsterdam. When his plane arrives, Coady believes he is in Amsterdam, not because he knows this for sure – he has never been to Amsterdam before – but because the pilot assures the passengers over the intercom that they are landing in Amsterdam. When he checks into his hotel, he fills out a form giving his name, date of birth, citizenship and so on. Not only is all of this accepted as true by the desk clerk simply because Coady says it is true, but also Coady himself believes it is true. He is sure that he is named C A J Coady, that he was born on such-and-such a date, and that he is so many years old not because of any concrete evidence but because others have told him that these things are true.

The next morning, when Coady wakes up, he calls the desk to get the local time, and he belies what the desk clerk says. Over breakfast, he reads a paperback about the amazing exploits of Napoleon more than 150 years before, and he believes that there was a Napoleon who was important in history, even though he has obviously not met Napoleon personally or experienced any of his exploits at first hand. The morning paper carries news of a military coup in Spain, and even though he has no way of verifying this for himself, he takes this news to be factual. After breakfast, Coady heads out of the hotel to do some sightseeing, tourist map in hand, once more trusting himself to the word of others. The point is clear. In a scientific age, we may think we base our knowledge and decision making on hard evidence, but in fact we live life mainly on the basis of testimony. Everyday life is dependent on people’s speaking truthful words to us.

No wonder we dream of a world where advertisers tell the truth [as in the film Crazy People]. No wonder we hunger for public discourse to be free of deception and spin. No wonder we yearn for people to be as good as their word. No wonder, then, that when Christians put breakfast dishes in the sink and head out into the workaday world, what they are called to do, and what the world most needs from them, is to go out there and in every area of life to tell the truth. It is startling, often breathtakingly refreshing, and, as Crazy People wryly reminds us, sometimes seemingly insane, but it is what Christian testimony is all about: telling the truth.

From chapter 5 of Testimony – talking ourselves into being Christian, published by Joessey Bass 2004

Laughing Matters

Phil Callaway

It was an austere weekend. Dignitaries had gathered from around the world to witness the conferring of degrees upon worthy students. In the midst of it all, I was asked to present a humour award to a retiring faculty member known for his laughter amid tough times. I stood to my feet, wondering how the audience would respond.

‘It gives me no small degree of goose bumps to present an award to a man who is no stranger among us,’ I began, ‘although we sometimes wish he were…after some of the jokes he tells. Dr Gerald Wheatley stopped me the other day and said, ‘Did you hear the one about the two cannibals who were eating a clown? One says to the other, "Does this taste funny to you?" Dr Wheatley can tell cannibal jokes at the dinner table until your six-ounce steak doesn’t look so appealing. Jokes like, "What did the cannibal get when he was late for breakfast? The cold shoulder." Or "What is a cannibal’s favourite game? Swallow the leader." His favourite is about the cannibal who loved fast food. He ordered a pizza with everybody on it.’

Although the jokes were a little corny, everyone seemed to be smiling.

‘Dr Wheatley,’ I continued, ‘we are thankful for a man who takes God seriously, but who also believes that life is too serious not to spend a good deal of it laughing. To you I present two awards.’

‘First,’ I said, handing this distinguished professor a box of wheat crackers, ‘the Cracked Wheatley Award, for outstanding service, especially during coffee time in the faculty lounge. G K Chesterton once said that angels can fly because they take themselves so lightly. So, it seems, can you. Thanks for the jokes. Thanks for your example. Thanks for the reminder that those who laugh, last. And that Christians do not need to look like they were baptized in lemon juice.’

Then I took out a healthy bunch of bananas.

‘You once told me that politicians and bananas are alike. They are yellow, crooked and they hang out in bunches. So I would like to present you with the Ripe Banana Award. Dr Wheatley, may you live long enough to be older than your jokes.’

From chapter 7 of Laughing Matters – learning to laugh when life stinks, published by Multnomah 2005

God of the Whenua

Bill Bennett

The Judaeo-Christian tradition has deeply permeated Pakeha culture. For some, festivals such as Rogationtide (blessing the land for spring planting), Plough Sunday, and Harvest Thanksgiving, continue to remind them of a God who creates and sustains the earth, monitors the seasons and encourages a responsible work ethic. There is a strong cultural affirmation of a God who brings life out of dormancy, and provides for human need, who shapes the landscape and invites the farmer to participate in oversight of the land, the crops and the living creatures under his care. Many land owners affirm the biblical ideas of giftedness, especially those whose association with land is measured in generations. They honour and respect the primal creative forces which have shaped the land and the Creator God who has brought it into being. Land is precious and they are its stewards. Still others have experienced dispossession through financial loss associated with economic depression and climatic disaster.

However, there are many others whose relationship with the land is more utilitarian. It is something to be purchased and from which a living is made. In contrast to Maori, Pakeha accept the principle of individual title and ownership, a profitable rate of return and personal responsibility and personal rewards. This is a cultural rather than a biblical principle.

It is hard to determine where the biblical scenario finishes and where a distinctively Pakeha theology begins. As Neil Darragh comments: ‘The contemporary Pakeha Australasian Christian understanding of God and human life exists in a form of an overseas reality, the origins of our denominational traditions.’ Land, its management and care, its changing usage and profitability, its meaning for generations of farmers and those who gain their livelihood indirectly from it, are all part of the theological landscape. Land is a flexible tool.

For many Pakeha there tends to be a separation in heart and mind between occupation or ownership of land and that of identity. Unlike that of the Maori, this is a Pakeha cultural reality – identity is general not dependent on place. Yet, increasingly, there are people whose self-awareness is inextricably bound up with the land they have inherited or purchased.

Boyd Wilson’s reflective essay, ‘Malkuth: Parables from the Community of Land,’ superbly captures the vast canvas of time and creativity that enables recent generations to work the land. He teases out the sense of vocation and daily work that characterises those who work on and with it, and the succession of gain and loss that has transformed people’s lives.

From chapter 6 of God of the Whenua – rural ministry in Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Philip Garside 2005

Pints of View

Peter Howick-Jones and Nick Wills

How many obstacles do we want to put in the way of those we are seeking to reach out to? So often the venue, the cultural assumptions, the language used, the length of the event, the expectation to stay and join in and say things that might compromise someone’s integrity, all conspire to act as barriers. Pints of View [which is held in a pub] seems not only to eliminate possible barriers, but actively find points of connection. On one occasion we turned up half an hour before the event, and found that one of the tables right in the middle of our usual area was already taken, by a young man and two young women. In preparing the area, we began chatting with them, and explained what was about to happen, and asked if that was OK with them. They were fine, and said, ‘No, you carry on, we’re going soon.’

The event started, and the people at the table were chatting away, and sometimes listening in. Someone then asked a question about asylum seekers and illegal immigration, and particularly about new Government legislation placing the onus for ensuring that lorries were not carrying illegal immigrants, on the drivers. We responded to the question, and said that we felt it was unfair to punish lorry drivers for another individual’s illegal actions.

At this point the young bloke at the table turned around and joined in, telling us that he was a long-distance lorry driver who was just passing through. He engaged with the discussion with a lot of passion and then he and his friends continued to do so as we talked about other issues, and he raise genuine questions of faith.

Afterwards we chatted some more with him. He was amazed the clergy were doing something like this, and felt able to talk openly about his life and beliefs. All this happened because we had chatted with them, and then found a point of contact which nobody would have predicted beforehand.

From chapter 3 of Pints of View – encounters down the pub, published by Grove Books 2005

Daily Writer on Holiday

The Daily Writer is on holiday from mid-December to mid-January.

Spoken from the Heart

Selwyn Hughes

Day after day we go about our tasks on this sin-stained planet gathering one impurity after another, being forced to listen to blasphemies and language that is an offence both to God and all decent people. Because of this, how we need to breathe in the filtering freshness of the spiritual oxygen that comes to us through His Holy Spirit.

One of the great evidence of the Welsh Revival in 1904 when God’s breath blew over the Principality in a powerful way was the fact that people’s lives were cleaned up in the most amazing manner. Old debts were paid, bad language gave way to the praises of God and people would cross the valleys to each other’s homes in order to clear up any bad feeling that had been between them.

It is a well-known fact that miners who directed the pit ponies with swear words, after they were converted didn’t want to swear anymore, so they had to teach the pit ponies new and cleaner commands.

It was like this in the Hebrides Revival in 1959 too. A group of people were praying in church and some stood
up and read from Psalm 24: ‘Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to an idol or swear by what is false.’

One of the congregation followed the reading with a prayer that went something like this, ‘O God, forgive us if our hands are not clean and our hearts are not pure.’ A young man immediately stood up and startled the congregation by crying out: ‘It is so much humbug to talk about our hearts and hands not being clean. We need to drop the ‘our’ and replace it with ‘my’.’

Then he proceeded to pray, ‘Oh, God, my hands are not clean, my heart is not pure…forgive me,’ and falling to the ground in repentance provoked others to follow in the same vein. People made their praying very personal and cried out to God in such a way that the Holy Spirit fell on the island ushering in one of the great movements of the Spirit in the twentieth century.

From chapter 3 of Spoken from the Heart – sermons by the author, published by CWR 2005

Ambiguous Evangelism

Bob Mayo with Sara Savage and Sylvie Collins

I worked for three years as the chaplain at London South Bank University. South Bank was a large multi-campus site with around 18,000 students. I had one room and no immediate role in the life of the university. My initial task was to make people realise that there was a chaplain in place. I had to deal with the fact that there was no understanding in many people’s minds of what a chaplain might do – but could only do so after they had realised that there was someone there at all.

I had no publicity budget and I felt that I was never going to manage to communicate clearly to a large and transitory student population. There were some people who would always come along and there were others who were never going to come. If all I did was to communicate a clear and comprehensive picture of the services on offer in the chaplaincy, then it would have brought me to the attention of people who were potentially interested in any case and therefore would probably have found them anyway. It would probably also have confirmed in the minds of others why they would not choose to access the services of a chaplaincy. I wanted to connect with some of those ‘others’ and give them just enough awareness to make them think of making further enquiries. So I set out to present the work of chaplaincy creatively and ambiguously.

On one occasion, I performed a play-parable by setting myself up with all the equipment needed to clean people’s shoes. Formally dressed in black suit and clerical shirt, I presented myself as a caricature of a priest. People were intrigued, amused and confused. When asked why I was doing this, I would deliberately reply enigmatically. I would tell people that it was all ‘part of the service.’ My cleaning people’s shoes while dressed up in full clerical garb was an acted-out parable, the point of which was not to explain what I was doing but to leave people intrigued enough to wonder and to ask further questions.

Over the next three years, I used various other pieces of ambiguous communication. I took photographs of a biscuit and used it on a poster with the words ‘@ The Chaplaincy.’ I did email-shots of staff and students using words of poems such a Stevie Smith’s ‘Not waving but drowning.’ When the kettle was stolen from the chaplaincy, I put up 300 notices around the university saying, ‘God knows who has got the kettle.’ I created different designs for the writing paper I used. One design had an image of a priest-clown in a dog collar; another was with a spoof press release: SHOCK HORROR! VICAR FOUND DOING HIS JOB!

By providing the optimum level of information and insight, people can choose either to pursue an interest or else to walk away from what they have heard. David Attenborough said on Desert Island Discs (1999) that the best way to get someone interested in a subject is to show a great energy combined with a great ignorance. There is a lightness of touch assumed within this approach that does not leave people feeling disempowered or judged, but instead allows them to come back to ask about what they hear as being said. When the disciples of John the Baptist come to ask Jesus if he is ‘the one who was to come’ or whether they should expect another, Jesus does not give them a point-by-point explanation but tells them to look around and to draw conclusions from what they see.

From chapter 5 of Ambiguous Evangelism, published by SPCK 2004

Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse

Jason Boyett
March 26, 1997
Failed opera singer Marshall Herff Applewhite and his soul-mate, a spirit-channelling registered nurse named Bonnie Lu Nettles, hook up in the 1970s and start their own little saucer cult. Typical story: He’s a two-thousand-year-old alien, she’s no less than God Almighty and the mother ship is supposed to swing by to pick them up in the 1975. It….doesn’t. Bonnie ends up being mortal after all and dies of cancer in 1985. Applewhite (known to his followers as "Do," as in "Re Mi Fa So") continues to attract cult members, collecting them in a sprawling house in Rancho Santa Fe, California, under the pleasant moniker "Heaven’s Gate." Most of them are computer geeks. They build websites. They shave their heads. They wear colourful little jumpers and matching tennis shoes. And the guys get castrated.

They all live happy little productive robot-like lives until 1997, when amateur astronomer Chuck Schramek mistakes a star for a "Saturn-like object" following the Hale-Bopp comet. Schramek goes on the Art Bell radio show, and before you know it, his "object" has become a bona-fide UFO hiding in the comet’s wake. Which is good news for Do and his androids, because that’s exactly what they’ve been waiting for all this time. It’s Bonnie Lu! She’s swinging by to pick us up!

So the Gaters shoot a creepy video in which they each say bye-bye to family and friends. After dropping the tapes in the mail, they share a few spoonfuls of poisoned apple sauce. Police get a tip from a family member who gets nervous after watching the "I’m-leaving-on-a-spaceship" video. Next stop is the nightly news, complete with footage of each member stretched out dead on his or her cot – their shed "earthly vehicles" covered by a purple cloth.

October 1997, St Louis.
Pentecostal pastor Kenneth Hagin predicts Christ’s Second Coming and the Rapture of the saints, starting in St Louis, ‘The heart and centre of the nation." Of course. Never having personally been to St Louis, the Pocket Guide can’t give an accurate report. Did anything happen? Is anyone still there? Did Jesus become mayor or what?

From chapter 3 of Pocket Guide to the Apocalypse – the official field manual for the end of the word, published by RelevantBooks, 2005

The Journey Towards Relevance

Kary Oberbrunner

Conformists often ‘get killed’ out in the world because they have no community of faith. Many conformists are independent wounded sheep who have been bitten by other sheep. The last thing they want to do is hang around with more sheep. Organised church scares them, and so they wander out on their own to face the big world.

I understand this tendency. I just don’t agree with it. If the only church available is a church filled with legalistic separatists, then by all means separate from the separatists! Nonetheless, every believer needs to be involved in a community of faith. These communities probably look a lot different than the traditional church many of us grew up attending. They don’t need to meet in a building or have an order of service.

The trend among many young adults is to just be floaters. They’re not sure why they attend a church, but they think it’s something they should do. So, for a time, they casually try out churches. They may even commit to attending a church. But, every church has its warts, and soon they become disillusioned and quit assembling.

At one point in my life, I became disillusioned with the Church. I saw its gossip, legalism, and petty rule-based religiosity. I attended out of duty for several months. Then I decided to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. I decided to stop looking at my needs and how the Church was not meeting them. I saw a vast number of wounded believers who were just as tired and fed up as me. I decided I would try to serve them.

I quickly found there were needs all around. Sure, the Church has warts. After all, it’s filled with people like you and me. Regardless, there is no perfect church. I think God must have a sense of humour. He knew I had given on the Church so much, and ironically, He decided to have me work in one.

I’m not sure which church God wants you to be a part of. In fact, you may need to start your own. Why not? If the churches around you are so archaic and filled with separatism, then assemble your own gathering of believers. You might see how difficult it is to have a community of faith who are transformists.

From chapter 5 of The Journey Towards Relevance – simple steps for transforming your world, published by RelevantBooks, 2004

Who Stands Fast

Michael Duncan

I believe God eventually showed me I had to let go of those years so as not be further embittered by them. It took a long time to do this and still I was left with gnawing question of how to frame my understanding. These were years of tears, grief, death, losses, extreme hardship, bitter disappointments, betrayals, sickness, insomnia, and confusion. How do you make sense of them? What do you do with that? At last, I think I am beginning to see.

Early in 2004, I was fulfilling a speaking engagement in a New Zealand city and true to form, visited a Christian book store. Once inside I am like a child in a toy store. My eyes morph into saucers; I salivate and relish each and every purchase. On this occasion, my eye caught the title: God at War, by an author I had never heard of before, Gregory Boyd. As I was doing some post graduate research in the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who courageously stood up to Hitler even to the point of joining a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, I was interested in issues of pacifism and violence. Without even scanning the sub-title, contents page or the price, I impulsively bought this book.

Back home, settling into my bookish cave, I began to realise, to my absolute amazement that I had just bought a 413 page book on spiritual warfare. I set about devouring this tome and so began a journey of discovery and the path to the profound explanation I had been seeking. This book began to theologically frame my story. I found it incredibly refreshing, insightful liberating and theologically challenging. I have since bought just about everything Gregory Boyd has written and sifted through it with a theological toothpick.

From chapter 2 of Who Stands Fast – discipleship in difficult places, published by UNOH Publications, 2005 –

Walking by Faith

Florence Howland

That month I had a bad report on the state of the [Mission] hall floor. It was very old, full of dry rot, and had to be replaced. It was most unsafe. Five hundred pounds our builder quoted. What could we do? We didn’t have that sort of money.

As I discussed the problem and the need for urgency with the builder, the Deaconess who opened the mail came to me with a cheque made out to the Kensal Medical Gospel Mission for five hundred pounds. I was bowled over and could hardly speak and the builder who knew I had heart trouble said, ‘Miss Howland, what’s happened? Is somebody there with you? Have you had a bad turn?’

"No,’ I replied, ‘but you just told me that the floor might cost five hundred pounds and I have just been sent five hundred pounds in the mail, but I don’t know who sent it to me.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘that’s what I can’t understand about you. If I had nothing in the bank I’d feel really weak. But if I suddenly found I’d got five hundred pounds I’d feel mighty strong. With you it’s the other way round. Nothing in the bank and feel ok. Five hundred pounds in and feel all weak. I don’t know: the stories you girls can tell about God supplying everything you need.’

Where had this money come from? Early on I had an idea but couldn’t understand what had motivated the gift. It started with the relieving nurse who got caught in the rain and seemed to be as poor as a church mouse. One Saturday night after being out for the day and returning to our Mission she passed numbers of public houses still open. Children were playing the streets waiting for their parents to finish drinking and fighting at closing time. When she got home a voice said to her, ‘and you are prepared to take Dividends from those breweries that cause this sort of thing to happen.’ Immediately she got down on her knees and prayed, ‘Lord, if those shares that my aunt left me when she died are in a brewery I will give them all to you.’

It turned out they were brewery shares and she kept her promise. She gave our Mission five hundred pounds, which helped pay for the floor, and five hundred pounds also to Adeline Wallace of the Mission of Hope.

From chapter 7 of Walking by Faith, published by the author, 2005

Practitioners

Spencer Burke

The thing that I’m worried about is the fact that the two big films of 2004 were The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11. And what were they? They were basically two very extreme films. They were both promoted within these incestual little Petrie dishes, whether it was to liberal Democrats or to conservative Christians. What both these films tapped is the point here. The Passion, in the long run, probably didn’t have that big of an effect because a lot of Christians were the ones who went to see it. Fahrenheit 9/11 didn’t have that big of an impact, at least not as big as the Republicans were all worried about, because it was a bunch of lean-hard liberals who went and saw it. It just proves one thing: that people will get really excited and spend a lot of money for ‘their thing.’

So I’m hoping that we move away from that and embrace broader films that help share the story. Why does it have to be a ‘Christian’ film? I don’t know if you saw it, but at the same exact time The Passion came out, a film called In America was playing. The Christian Science Monitor called me and asked me to go review The Passion . So I went and saw the film, and I said to the Monitor, ‘You know what? I saw In America the night before I saw The Passion. If I were to invite the people in my neighbourhood to talk about the issue of redemption, I would invite them to In America. I mean, it’s an amazing, powerful script.’

The problem is that you never hear a pastor or anyone anywhere say, ‘I challenge all of you right now to go out to our information booth. We have In America tickets available. In fact, we rented the entire theatre. We want you to bring your neighbourhoods to see this film.’

I think we need to start embracing films that might not be considered ‘Christian’ a little more. We live in a Christian ghetto that says, ‘If they’re not for us, they must be against us. Anybody who practices faith, meditation or prayer is evil if their focus isn’t Jesus.’ Then we embrace criminals and crooks from the business world, bring them in and pay them high dollars to train our pastor to run churches as if the pastors were CEOs. And now some of these business crooks are in jail.

From page 88 of Practitioners – voices within the emerging church, published by Regal 2005