Phill Sacre

Category: Christian

Anything I write about the Christian faith.

  • Preaching, Rhetoric and Michael Curry

    OK, OK, I know everyone is bored of talking about Michael Curry now. But I wanted to pick up on one thing which few people have really talked about – the delivery and style of his sermon, rather than the content. In my previous post I said that it was powerful, and Ian Paul has already written what preachers can learn from him. But I think, having had a week to reflect, there is more to say – which is that the sermon wasn’t a great sermon in terms of a piece of communication. Let me try to explain by reflecting on what I try to do in a sermon. These are some of the lessons I’ve picked up over the last few years of preaching – I do this in the hope it may be helpful for others preachers or public speakers.

    1. What is the main message you are trying to get across?

    One of the best lessons I ever learned when it comes to preaching was – before you write the sermon, you need to come up with a short – preferably single sentence – aim of the sermon. Can you boil it down to the ‘in a nutshell’ version? If you can’t – chances are, it won’t be a good sermon. This is one of the real insights I got from Haddon Robinson in his classic book ‘Expository Preaching’.

    What most new preachers do is look at a passage, and try to come up with a few helpful things to say about it – but there’s often nothing to hold it together, no overarching theme.

    I’ve found the most effective sermons are those with a particular aim / purpose. You have a particular truth about God, which flows from the Bible passage, that you want to communicate. I’ve found this will be enormously helpful in preaching – because then when you preach you won’t be saying random things, but rather trying to communicate a particular truth.

    At theological college, in my first year preaching class we learned to ask four deceptively simple questions about our sermon: What do people need to know? And why? What do people need to do? And why? A sermon is not simply a transfer of information, it’s a call to action. In order for that to be effective you need to have a clear purpose of the sermon, a goal, an aim.

    Let’s think about Michael Curry for a second: did he do this? I’m not sure that he did. He talked a lot about love – he mentioned it over 50 times – but was there a particular message? If anything, his message was “wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all tried harder to love each other” – which, leaving aside the problems I’ve already talked about – I’m not sure is a particularly coherent Christian aim.

    2. The ‘So What?’ test

    Another factor of a sermon, as I’ve already mentioned, is a call to action. That is – preachers don’t want people simply to understand something. They want them to do something. In every sermon I preach I try to think about ‘application’ – that is, how the particular theological truth I’m communicating connects with people’s lives – how they can put what I’m saying into practice. Sometimes this is easy, sometimes this is not so easy – but it’s really important to do.

    For example, if you’re teaching on (say) Romans 8:28, rather than simply saying “God works everything for good in your life” – it would be much more effective to say “think about the toughest situation you’re facing right now. God can and will use even that situation for good.” I’d maybe give an example from my own life of how God used a tough situation.

    In other words, don’t just give people the abstract truth – ground it in concrete things.

    Did Michael Curry do this? Again – he talked a lot about how love can change the world, but he didn’t really talk about what we should actually do – beyond simply ‘love each other more’. I don’t think that’s really a helpful application – particularly given that we find it difficult to love. That’s the thing: the rubber hits the road in preaching when you talk to people about how to deal with genuine struggles they have. If you don’t deal with people’s sin, you haven’t really preached.

    3. Talking like a normal person

    Another of the really helpful things I’ve learned over the years about preaching is that God uses the whole person to preach. God doesn’t call preachers to leave behind everything when they come into the pulpit. God uses me, a sinner, to preach to other sinners, to talk about finding his grace. God has given me my personality, my life, my experiences, gifts, etc – I bring them all with me into the pulpit.

    In other words, when people see you in the pulpit, they should see ‘the real you’. I think this is another mistake people who start out preaching (or public speaking) often make: they write out sermons in full, and them read them as if they’re reading the news. I’d say – God has given you a personality for a reason. Don’t become someone else in the pulpit – just talk as you would talk to a friend. In this day and age, authenticity is a big thing – people can perceive when you’re trying to put on an act. Being genuine matters a lot more than it used to.

    You need to engage with people on an emotional level – and in order to do that, they need to see you as a real person – not someone you’re presenting to mask the real you. (On a practical note – I’ve found it helpful to get away from writing out a full script with sermons. We write differently to how we talk. But it’s not time to talk about that here,)

    Did Michael Curry do this? This is a tricky one because I certainly think his personality shone through. At the same time, I’m not sure he came across as very authentic – he didn’t talk about himself or reveal anything. I don’t think he really connected emotionally. To me, the sermon was like listening to Blur – it may sound technically impressive but didn’t get you in the heart like Oasis. (Yes, I’m an Oasis man rather than a Blur man. I know that many people prefer Blur, so this point is of course subjective… if you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up ‘Britpop’)

    4. Leave them with Jesus

    The apostle Paul wrote these words in his first letter to the Corinthians:

    And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power. 1 Corinthians 2:1-4

    What had prompted him to write this? It’s possible there were others coming in who the Corinthian church thought were brilliant because of their excellent preaching – they were rhetorically gifted and their sermons sounded learned and wise. But they weren’t preaching the true gospel. Paul, by contrast, says that he did not come “with eloquence or human wisdom” but rather preaching “Jesus Christ and him crucified”, “with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power”. Why? “So that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”

    I think this is the heart of the matter: true preaching leaves people with Christ. There’s a lovely line in the last verse of the hymn “May the Mind of Christ my Saviour“:

    May His beauty rest upon me
    As I seek the lost to win,
    And may they forget the channel,
    Seeing only Him.

    “May they forget the channel, seeing only Him.” I think that’s a wonderful description of good preaching: people are left with the beauty and glory of Jesus, rather than the preacher. This is what I love about Spurgeon – he was extraordinarily gifted with words, but he always, always, always brought people to Christ. Spurgeon knew, as all good preachers do, that Christ is what we need. People don’t need a good sermon for its own sake – people need Jesus.

    Did Michael Curry do this? I think it’s hugely telling that after the sermon people weren’t talking about Jesus – they were talking about Michael Curry. Straight after the sermon, the commentator Huw Edwards summarised the sermon by talking about love – and not at all about Jesus. And that, to my mind, is the biggest failure of the sermon.

    I am not a great preacher, but in every sermon I try to commend Christ in some way. I was preaching at a wedding this afternoon, and I said to them – if you want to love, don’t look to yourselves, look to Jesus. Christ is the one we proclaim, not ourselves. Judging by what people have been talking about this last week, Michael Curry did a pretty good job at proclaiming himself… not so much a good job at proclaiming Christ.

    I pray that it may never be the case for me that people talk or think about me and the sermon more than they talk or think about Christ.

  • Royal Wedding Sermon: Michael Curry’s Bad News

    A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross. – H. Richard Niebuhr

    One of the biggest talking points of the royal wedding yesterday between Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is – unpredictably – the sermon. Even The Guardian have got in on the act! Everyone seems to be talking about how great it was. (If you missed it, you can read a full transcript here).

    Given all of this, I really hate to rain on the parade – but, I have to be honest, I didn’t like it. I mean, sure, the delivery was amazing. As an orator he did absolutely brilliantly – you have to admit it was powerful. But what about the content? After all, if he didn’t really communicate anything – at the end of the day, as a piece of communication, it didn’t do what it needed to.

    If you watched it, I’d be interested to hear what message did you hear? What was the ‘take-home’ point? Something about love for sure – maybe, “we need to love each other”. Maybe something about God’s love or Jesus’ love thrown in there. It was an inspiring message, wasn’t it? We all like a bit of love!

    But – this is exactly the problem, as I see it. Michael Curry avoided talking about the kind of love which really matters. Let me explain by briefly telling you about someone called Pelagius.

    Pelagius was a theologian who was born in around 354. The real interest for our purposes is in what he taught. Here’s a section of what Britannica have to say about him:

    After the fall of Rome to the Visigoth chieftain Alaric in 410, Pelagius and Celestius went to Africa. There they encountered the hostile criticism of Augustine, who published several denunciatory letters concerning their doctrine, particularly Pelagius’ insistence on man’s basically good moral nature and on man’s own responsibility for voluntarily choosing Christian asceticism for his spiritual advancement.

    Pelagius’ key teaching was that we human beings are basically good, and we simply need to choose what is good – an ascetic lifestyle – to grow spiritually and closer to God etc. This teaching became known as Pelagianism.

    The thing is, Pelagianism is alive and well today – in fact, I think it’s the default state of many people. We can solve our own problems if we simply try harder. It’s in our own power to choose what is right.

    The problem with this view is that it removes the need for Christ. If we are basically good people who have the ability to choose the good every time, then why do we even need a Saviour? Why do we need a Christ who saves his people from their sins (Matthew 1:21)? Can’t we just save ourselves?

    And this is the problem with Pelagianism: it all but removes the need for a Saviour. It leads to the quote I started with – ‘a Christ without a cross…’ And the tragedy of it all is that the Bible says we cannot save ourselves. The Bible constantly reinforces our sinfulness and our need for a Saviour. I talk about this in my video about whether we are good people.

    Let’s apply this to Michael Curry’s sermon. The sermon – as it seemed to me – at no point suggested that we have a problem with loving God and loving our neighbour – a problem the Bible calls sin. The sermon advocated loving each other – and imagining what the world would be if we did love each other. Of course, that would be a wonderful place to live! But we don’t live in that world. In fact, we live in a world where by nature we are selfish people, not inclined to love God or others. If we want to solve that problem, we need a solution which is bigger than ourselves – we need God to step in.

    And this is the tragedy of the sermon: Curry basically said ‘try harder’. But we are incapable of achieving the love God requires by trying harder. We need new hearts, new hearts which only God can give. Instead of looking to ourselves for the solution, we need to be looking to Jesus. Someone who does try their hardest to win favour with God will ultimately despair – for evidence of that, read a biography of Martin Luther and what led him to the reformation.

    This is why I said that Michael Curry’s message is ‘bad news’: it’s bad news because it bypasses the solution that God has given us in Jesus Christ. It bypasses the salvation that only to be found in him, and it leaves us with ourselves – us who are incapable of loving God and our neighbour as we should.

    When I preach a sermon – at a wedding or in any service – I always try to proclaim Christ in some way. Jesus Christ is the solution to our needs, even if we do not yet realise it. Christ is the answer, the one who we must look to.

    If you want to see me talk about this in a marriage context, have a look at this video on relationship issues.
     
    https://youtu.be/IvVCty_99Pw

  • The lost art of Catechism

    Catechism (n):

    1. an elementary book containing a summary of the principles of the Christian religion, especially as maintained by a particular church, in the form of questions and answers.

    In our church we regularly run courses for people who want to find out more about the Christian faith. In the past we’ve run Alpha, and more recently we’ve started running Christianity Explored. By the grace of God we have seen a number of people come into the church over the last few years, partly as a result of these courses. In my home group at the moment we have a number of folks who have only come into church in the last few years and I’ve had a chance to get to know them pretty well – and get to know their needs, spiritually speaking.

    What I’ve been finding is that people who come into faith these days are coming from a background of virtually no knowledge about God, Jesus, the Bible, the cross, etc. There is just simply no background knowledge of the Christian faith. Everything has to be built from the ground up, which takes time.

    The realisation that I’ve been coming to is that we need to rethink the way that the church disciples new believers. Sunday services are a good start – but we’ve found it’s tough to encourage people to come when there are so many other competing demands on time. Church is a big commitment – a commitment which is absolutely worth it, for sure – but I think it’s hard to understand just how significant it is for people to make that commitment. According to some research I read recently, even those who are committed will come twice a month – something which we see in our church here. Is twice a month enough to understand the Christian faith? And even if someone comes more – sermons are not generally designed to teach faith in a systematic way. Church services are a good start but they’re not enough!

    Bible studies are usually the next step. And for good reason: I have benefited so much over the years from them – but again, they have limitations. What I’ve found in my home group these last few years is that the newer Christians have actually struggled more with Bible studies because they do not have the Christian worldview to go along with it. Understanding the Bible takes time and effort, and in particular one needs to understand the ‘big picture’ of the Bible and its theology alongside the individual books and chapters. The two feed into each other – growth in one leads to growth in the other.

    So the question in my mind is: how can we, as churches, focus on being intentional about teaching a Christian worldview? Especially for new believers – who have heard nothing but the world preaching to them for their whole lives. To put it another way, how do we best equip people coming from a background with virtually no Christian understanding to come to a mature faith?

    Bible study will get you there – but it will take time if you work your way systematically through books of the Bible. There is an alternative, which has been used by the church for centuries but has fallen somewhat out of favour these days: catechism (or catechesis, but let’s not complicate things). A catechism is a series of questions and answers designed to teach the faith, which are designed to be learned by members of a church – in the Anglican tradition, the catechism was designed to be used before confirmation. (There is a catechism in the Book of Common Prayer, but we’ve never used it in our church and I think most churches don’t use it).

    The idea is that it teaches believers a kind of ‘Christian basics’ course, which covers things like who God is, the Bible, the ten commandments, the creed, etc. It’s a (relatively) short summary of the Christian faith. Tim Keller says: “classic catechisms take students through the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer—a perfect balance of biblical theology, practical ethics, and spiritual experience.” It is, in other words, what all believers – but especially new Christians – need to get going in the Christian life.

    Personally I think that revising the catechism format for the 21st century would be a great way of discipling believers to face the problems of a post-Christian world. That’s not to say it should replace Bible study, but rather complement it.

    I’m not the only one saying this – and, in fact, I was very heartened to see that one church has produced the New City Catechism. This is a catechism which is taken from a number of classic catechisms but updated for the 21st century – you can read it all online or via an app, alongside a few paragraphs of explanation. There are 52 questions and answers – one per week over the course of a year. (Not too taxing!)

    Personally I think this is a great idea and I’m going to try and start using it at every opportunity. I’ve actually started vlogging my way through the catechism, if you’d like to join me you’d be very welcome – here’s the first video (the introduction basically says just what I’ve said here).

    Learning doctrine has been immensely helpful for me in my Christian life – not simply reading the Bible (although that is essential), but putting the pieces together. The catechism is an excellent way of starting to do that. If you’ve not done it before, I would urge you to give it a try.

    I’ve deleted the original video, but you can see the whole course online at Understand the Bible.

  • Videos & the blog – update

    I’ve just uploaded the last in my series on “How to grow as a Christian” – looking at the cross from Mark’s gospel.

    I apologise that my blog has become even more neglected over the last month, but I have been uploading videos weekly.
    If you want to follow these videos, the best thing is to subscribe to my channel there (click the Subscribe button on that page). You can also subscribe on Facebook, but I tend to find Facebook a bit more unreliable for showing you new content.
    I will try to get a mailing list set up with new videos as that is probably the safest way! But the best bet for now is to subscribe on YouTube.
    I’m not going to close the blog, but I just wanted to explain where I am while I’m not here…

  • New video series: How to grow as a Christian


    I’ve started a new series on my vlog – “How to grow as a Christian”. This was originally an idea for a lent course, but I thought it would work well on the vlog as well.

  • Can we be optimistic about 2018?


    Happy New Year to all my blog followers! Seeing as my last one seemed to be received well, I decided to do another vlog message thinking about the subject of whether we can be optimistic in 2018. Given that the world is in such a mess at the moment – the bad news seems to be relentless – can we be optimistic about the coming year? This is my answer.

  • Christmas Message 2017: Grenfell, darkness, and a Saviour


    Rather than writing my Christmas Message on the blog this year, I thought I’d post up a video… the Bible passage I refer to is here in case you want to read along with me.

  • Peter Adam on depression


    I’ve been on a roll talking about mental health lately, so I thought I’d share this video I’ve just found (courtesy of the Gospel Coalition). It’s of Peter Adam talking about mental illness – in particular, his suffering with depression for 30 years.
    It’s a very honest interview and well worth watching.  Three points jumped out at me:

    1. How helpful it was to know that the depression was not random or pointless, but that God was sovereign over it. In particular, Peter was able to give some ways in which God had been able to use his depression over the years to good effect. This doesn’t make a bad thing good, but makes me give thanks to God that he always uses evil things for good purposes in the end (Genesis 50:20).
    2. He says that mental health shouldn’t be considered a different kind of issue to others which people experience. We are all broken in all sorts of different ways. The church is a place where sinful and broken people come together to find forgiveness and healing.
    3. I really liked what he said about the church. Someone once said “The church is a hospital for broken people, not a museum for perfect people.” I think this is true: sadly, a lot of churches are museums for perfect people – where the relationships never really get beyond the superficial. In my home group lately, I think all of us have begun to reach the level in our relationship where we are able to share what’s actually going on in our lives, to open ourselves up to being vulnerable. It has been immensely helpful for many of us to open up, share, pray for and support one another. The verse Peter mentions is Galatians 6:2, “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” Carrying each other’s burdens – a wonderful picture of the church.

    I hope you enjoy the video, he says a lot of helpful things which are well worth listening to from someone with 30 years experience.

  • Follow-up on mental health

    A few weeks ago I blogged about a Christian perspective on mental health. In that piece I started out by saying, “There is far, far more to say and I just wanted to make clear from the outset: this is just the beginning.”
    Well, today Glen Scrivener wrote an excellent piece on the Gospel Coalition website which I think is well worth reading as a sort of follow-up looking at how the gospel actually works in his and his wife’s particular example – dealing with anorexia. I said that there was plenty more to say, and I think this piece is an excellent complement to what I originally wanted to say.
    I hope that this kind of thing encourages Christians to speak up more in the context of mental health. I can’t remember where I read this now, but last week I came across a quote, saying something like: “Christians can’t answer every question, but every Christian should be able to finish the sentence ‘only God got me through…’”
    Churches shouldn’t be museums of perfect people but hospitals for for the broken.
    Glen finishes the article:

    It’s always tempting to think these struggles are a departure from the trajectory you’re meant to be on. Life is meant to be an unbroken ascent into . . . wait . . . that’s a theology of glory, isn’t it? As theologians of the cross, we ought to know Jesus is at work right here and right now, even—and especially—in suffering. He’s willing and able to redeem us from all evil (Gen. 48:16).
    We aren’t meant to sidestep or outwit this “departure” from our plans. The Lord knows how to redeem the years the locust has eaten (Joel 2:25). Maybe you’ll be able to comfort others with the comfort you’ve received in your affliction (2 Cor. 1:4). But whatever happens, you can let him handle those details.
    So friend, receive from Jesus, get in community, look at your own sins, love your partner, and pray, pray, pray. Jesus enters the mess and says, “Here I am. Let’s engage right here, right now.”

     Amen. Thanks be to God.

  • Homophobic bullying and CofE schools

    Today the Church of England unveiled a new document designed to help tackle homophobic, biphobic and transphobic (‘HBT’ – because there aren’t enough acronyms already) bullying in schools. You can read the press release on that page, and the document itself is linked at the bottom.

    Personally I find the document deeply troubling – although I (of course) agree that all bullying is wrong, I think the document is on the wrong track about the solution needed. The main problem I have is simply this: the document has an entirely secular view of what it means to flourish – which, for a church publication, is pretty awful. And, secondarily, it doesn’t really get to grips with a Christian response to LGBT pupils.

    Let me write briefly about those two things.

    What is human flourishing?

    The document seems to make a lot of human flourishing. The Executive Summary (p5) says:

    Church of England schools have at their heart a belief that all children are loved by God, are individually unique and that the school has a mission to help each pupil to fulfil their potential in all aspects of their personhood: physically, academically, socially, morally and spiritually.

    This sounds like management speak. The language of ‘potential’ is one which is not taken from the Bible: fulfilling our potential sounds very ‘me-focussed’ – we are not here to fulfill our potential but to glorify God.

    Jesus said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.” (Mark 8:34-35) The real genius, if I may put it like that, of Jesus’ words is that we only find our true potential when we deny ourselves and take up our cross – when we die to ourselves, we find true life.

    It’s precisely this kind of language which is absent from the CofE document.

    The core of education in the CofE Vision for Education is “Life in all its fullness”, which is explicitly taken from John 10:10 (see page 10). The problem is, this is completely devoid of meaning if it is taken out of the context of John’s gospel. When Jesus said those words, he didn’t mean that he wanted everyone to have the kind of life they always dreamed of living, or have a good life whether they believed in God or not. As I explained in my post about mental health, this is God’s world. We only achieve “Life to the full” when we live in accordance with God’s will and his ways – in contrast with “the thief” who comes “only to steal and kill and destroy”. As Jesus said in the previous verse “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.” You can’t take ‘fullness of life’ as a principle and ditch the rest. It just doesn’t work!

    The next page of the CofE document goes on (and I could pick many examples, but I will make this the last one): “At the heart of Christian distinctiveness in schools is an upholding of the worth of each person: all are Imago Dei – made in the image of God – and are loved unconditionally by God”. Again – one cannot talk about being made in the image of God without talking about the Fall, where we – as one of the CofE confessions puts it – “marred your image in us”. One cannot talk about unconditional love without talking about Jesus dying on the cross for our sins.

    Quite frankly, all this is sub-Christian. This doesn’t even mention the basics of the gospel, let alone have a coherent theological framework.

    Supporting LGBT pupils

    On page 19, the report talks about supporting LGBT pupils. It says:

    An important aspect of creating an inclusive school environment is the support offered to LGBT pupils. Many LGBT pupils do not feel supported at school and many report that they do not have an adult at school with whom to talk about being LGBT. This can impact on the mental health and wellbeing of pupils and it is therefore important that school staff members receive appropriate training to support young people. For many, coming out as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or non-binary is a joyful liberation into full selfhood. However for others it can become a lens through which other issues of personal non-acceptance are magnified. Supporting pupils struggling to feel at home within themselves requires careful discernment and loving wisdom.

    This paragraph does not read to me like it was written by someone who actually believes what the Bible (and the CofE – for the moment) teaches about marriage. Surely a Church of England school should have the confidence to believe and teach what the Church of England believes? As I said before about Tim Farron, God doesn’t simply give us arbitrary commands because he feels like it. God doesn’t want to spoil our fun, he wants to maximise our joy – which is why he gives us good rules to live by. Those who go outside of these rules are harming themselves.

    Surely this has a big impact on how we offer support to young people. We can’t simply say that we’ll offer support to affirm children in whatever decisions they want to make on these issues. If we believe in the Bible, if we believe in what Christians have always believed, we have to say that we cannot affirm things which are against God’s will. And that’s what baffles and distresses me about this document – there is no gospel at all in it. There is not even a hint of a suggestion that God might want us to live in particular ways. Although it recognises that there may be different opinions about sexuality etc. in the school, it simply sides by default with the ‘affirming’ viewpoint.

    This is simply not a Christian document.

    Responding to bullying

    I believe that children should not be bullied. I was bullied at school, I know many others who experienced the same – it can affect you well into adult life. Nonetheless, I don’t think this response is sufficient when it comes to bullying.

    Jesus tells us that the second greatest command is to “love others as yourself”. He demonstrated what that meant in his own life. You can love people while strongly disagreeing with them – in fact, loving them sometimes requires you to disagree with them! (Ian Paul wrote a great blog post about this today.)

    Jesus’ response to those who he considered sinful (i.e. everyone) was not to condemn: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:17). Instead, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt 9:36). Jesus had compassion on those who were broken and hurting – but it was a compassion which led to transformation.

    People who truly believe in the traditional Christian ethical teaching on marriage and sexuality should never bully anyone – because loving people is part and parcel of that same ethical teaching. But it is from love that we should boldly proclaim God’s way of living.

    We live in strange times, where even defending the traditional Christian view of marriage can get you into hot water (see e.g. Tim Farron and Jacob Rees-Mogg for two examples lately – there are many others). Some people think that simply stating the case for Christian marriage is bullying!

    What is incomprehensible to me is that the CofE should be encouraging its schools to essentially deny the gospel and contribute to a secular worldview which is leading to the demise of the CofE. Affirming children in sin is unloving, uncompassionate, and fundamentally unChristian. And the church should have no part in it. Rather, the church should be holding out the light of Christ to all, teaching children what it means to follow him.

    “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12)