Phill Sacre

Category: Christian

Anything I write about the Christian faith.

  • A few thoughts about safeguarding

    A few thoughts about safeguarding

    A couple of days ago, the organisation ThirtyOne:Eight released their review into what happened at Emmanuel Church Wimbledon and Jonathan Fletcher (see the report from the Independent Advisory Group for a shorter summary). This follows hard on the heels of the full report about Ravi Zacharias which was only released just over a month ago.

    Naturally, people have been talking a lot about these things. How could this happen? How can we ensure it never happens again?

    One of the things which came up with Jonathan Fletcher was “Fletcher Culture”. The problem with both Jonathan Fletcher and Ravi Zacharias was not with them alone but with the culture they created. Unfortunately in the case of Jonathan Fletcher, because his influence was extensive, that culture has managed to extend pretty widely into the conservative evangelical world.

    Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a lot about safeguarding, and I’d like to share a few brief thoughts.

    Safeguarding exists because of sin

    The first thing is, the reason safeguarding is necessary is because sin exists: if sin didn’t exist, there would be no need for safeguarding.

    Sin is a falling away from God’s standards. It is both actively doing what is wrong, as well as failing to do what is right. (This means that most sin falls within the second category – none of us love as we should.) Sin includes abusing power and authority as well as sexual immorality. Sin also includes failing to act when it’s in our power to do something about abuse. In other words, sin includes the specific wrongs done by an abuser as well as the culture which enables it.

    Now, of course, the church is made up of sinners. People don’t stop being sinners when they come to Christ! In fact, it’s almost the opposite: when people come to Christ, they realise how deep their sinfulness is. I’ve had several new Christians say to me that they thought they were doing OK before becoming Christians, but now they had only just begun to realise how bad they were.

    But – thanks be to God – there is good news!

    The solution to sin

    There is a remedy for sin! In Jesus Christ, God offers us not only forgiveness of sins – a complete cleansing – but the power of the Holy Spirit. We can bear the fruit of the Spirit in our lives (Galatians 5:22-24), not by our own strength but as the Holy Spirit works in us.

    Of course, that doesn’t mean that sin instantly disappears when we come to Christ. But it does mean that it has lost its power – we have a new master. Over time, as we walk in step with the Spirit, we are transformed day by day into the likeness of Christ.

    And because we are a church, we confess our sins to each other, pray for each other, and walk with each other. God doesn’t simply call us to run an individual race, but work together as a team. We encourage and help each other across the finish line, so to speak. In other words, as the Spirit works in our lives, he also creates a Christian community or culture. We grow in holiness not simply as individuals but as a church.

    The fundamental point I’m trying to make here is this: if the church is working properly, safeguarding should not be necessary. Safeguarding is something that should not be needed in the church full of people walking in step with the Spirit.

    Before anyone says anything – the fact that something shouldn’t be needed doesn’t mean it’s not needed. I’m not arguing here we should abolish all safeguarding officers and safeguarding best practices. That’s not the point I’m making here. Please bear with me…

    What about Ravi Zacharias and Jonathan Fletcher?

    I think you have to seriously question whether someone who is living in a pattern of unrepentant sin is actually a Christian. Sin is a powerful thing, and we can’t escape it on our own. But with Holy Spirit to convict us of our sin and help us to change, progress is possible. So, a Christian may have a battle over a sin like pornography, for example – but if the Holy Spirit was at work I would hope (even expect) to see that battle being won as time went by.

    I’ve seen a few people making the point over the last few weeks that we’re all sinners: any of us could have done what JF or RZ did. In a sense this is true. All of us are only what we are by the grace of God. At the same time, I think this is also doing a massive disservice to the Holy Spirit. Someone does not become a serial abuser without intent – no genuine repentance, no growth in holiness.

    Christians can and do sin in serious ways. There are many examples of Biblical characters who sin in pretty big ways. King David, for example, committed adultery with Bathsheba, but more than that – covered it up by having her husband killed! Having an affair is sadly not unknown for Christians, even Christian leaders. When it happens, repentance and reconciliation is possible but it takes time to heal. But if someone had many affairs, continually, over almost their entire adult life, it’s a different matter. That’s not sinning and repenting – that’s brazen disobedience. That’s the kind of behaviour that Hebrews 10 is talking about:

    If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God … How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?

    Hebrews 10:26-27, 29

    And that’s the issue with RZ and JF. They weren’t leaders who had a moral failure. They seemed to actively pursue what was wrong, again and again. They preached the gospel, but I’m not sure whether they really understood and believed the gospel.

    And this leads me on to the worst thing of all.

    What does it say about the culture?

    I would hope that a Christian organisation or network would be the kind of place where safeguarding happened naturally. If people were genuinely walking with the Spirit, in fellowship and prayer, then if someone was a bit ‘off’ I think it would show. It’s possible to preach an orthodox, Biblical sermon without being a believer – but it’s a lot harder to deceive people who know you well.

    If the whole church was truly growing in Christ and growing in holiness, than someone who wasn’t would stand out like a sore thumb. Except that… Ravi Zacharias and Jonathan Fletcher apparently didn’t stand out like a sore thumb. And that’s worrying: if Jonathan and Ravi were not walking in step with the Spirit, what does that say about the culture they were part of? (And the culture I am part of, to an extent?)

    What does it say about the conservative evangelical world that Jonathan Fletcher helped to create?

    What happened with Jonathan Fletcher and Ravi Zacharias is just the tip of the iceberg. It seems to me that we don’t need more safeguarding (as important as safeguarding is!). We need a much deeper spiritual reformation of the church. This is an issue which is not something which those people over there need to deal with (e.g. Emmanuel Church Wimbledon, or RZIM, or conservative evangelical churches). This is something that we, the church, need to deal with – in our own hearts and in our own churches.

    A new reformation

    Mike Ovey, late principal of the college where I trained for ordination, used to say that he was hoping and prayer for a new reformation. I’m more convinced by the day that he was right. We need nothing less in the church. I’ve talked about this a few times on the blog before (e.g. my previous post on Ravi Zacharias).

    We need to get on our knees and earnestly seek the Lord in prayer to renew and reform us.

  • Why has God taken our songs away?

    Why has God taken our songs away?

    Over the last 12 months during the pandemic, government guidance has prevented many churches from singing. Why has God allowed this to happen? In this short video we look at Psalm 95 to help us understand.

    Key points

    In the video I take a very brief look at Psalm 95.

    • Verses 1-2 tell us to sing – three times! There are two reasons to sing.
    • Firstly, in verses 3-5, we are to sing because God is a great God – he made everything.
    • Secondly, in verses 6-7, we are to sing because God cares for us.
    • The Psalm finishes with a warning in verses 8-11, not to be like the people of Israel at Meribah. This is referring to Exodus 17:1-7, where the people of Israel tested God. They grumbled against Moses and did not trust that God would provide water for them in the desert.
    • I wonder whether the reason God has taken our songs away is because we have been acting a bit like the people of Israel at Meribah and Massah: songs are an expression of trust in God and praising him for his deliverance and care. What does it say about God if we think it’s not safe to sing to him?
    • Perhaps this is an opportunity for us to do something like Matt Redman’s song, “Heart of Worship”. Maybe God wants us to learn what it means to trust him and praise him more deeply.
  • Have we focussed too much on apologetics?

    Have we focussed too much on apologetics?

    I see a lot of apologetics videos on YouTube, defending Christianity against progressive Christians or atheists etc. By focussing on this kind of content, I think we might be missing something important.

    I decided to try another video post because it seemed to work quite well last time. I’m beginning to find it more natural to express my thoughts in video format these days – but I do apologise for those of you who prefer a written format!

    In this video I wonder whether a lot of Christian channels focus so much on engaging with criticisms of Christianity that we’ve overlooked something important: we need to spend more time simply teaching the Christian faith.

    These are the basic points:

    1. Apologetics content lets the people you’re defending the faith against set the agenda;
    2. Most ordinary people aren’t asking those kind of questions – it’s easy on social media to get the view that everybody feels a certain way when it’s only a handful of very vocal activists;
    3. The best apologetic is teaching a Christian worldview.

    I think we should focus more on catechising, and I wrote a bit about this in my post here: The Lost Art of Catechism.

  • Are men the problem?

    Are men the problem?

    I’ve been thinking a lot about our response to Sarah Everard. One thing which really worries me is the way it pits men and women against one another. For once, I’ve actually tried to do a vlog about this rather than a written post. Over the last few months I’ve begun to feel it’s easier to say something that way. I don’t know whether I’ll try it again – there are pros and cons.

    If it doesn’t work well, I’ll probably never do another one! But I thought I’d see how it goes.

  • Me on Irreverend

    Me on Irreverend

    After my last couple of articles about Experts (this one and this one), the good chaps over at the Irreverend Podcast invited me to chat with them. We had a really good discussion – it’s quite long (about 90 minutes), but I think we covered some really interesting ground. It was a helpful conversation for me, anyway. It’s called “The End of Experts, the Rejection of Woke and the Rise of the Working Classes”.

    You can listen here, or via YouTube:

    Thanks to Jamie and Tom for having me on!

  • On experts and being too optimistic

    On experts and being too optimistic

    A few days ago, the Irreverend Podcast discussed my previous article about lockdown and the end of “experts”. I enjoyed the episode and I thought the discussion was helpful. It’s nice to find like-minded clergy who don’t buy into the typical Guardian worldview! Anyway, the conversation did provoke me to think about what I wrote – in particular, whether I am being a little too optimistic in thinking that this could be the end of Experts.

    On the podcast, they took a more pessimistic approach: I think the general mood was that it could take many years before the truth really comes out about lockdowns, and that it’s very unlikely we’ll see the end of Experts any time soon. I would like to explain why I wrote a more optimistic post.

    The short version is, I’m optimistic because of what I believe about the wider political context. Lockdowns, as I said last time, are a manifestation of a bigger problem – hence the discussion about Brexit. You could also throw into the mix climate change, wokeness, and various other related issues such as transgender (some of which I talked about in my post about political truth). I also believe that God is at work amongst all this mess.

    Let’s go back to the problem which has been developing over the last 30 years or so.

    Somewheres and Anywheres

    David Goodhart - The Road to Somewhere

    A few years ago I read David Goodhart’s excellent book, The Road to Somewhere. I thought it was a really helpful analysis of where we are and why, when the country voted to leave the EU in 2016, many of our politicians and media class simply couldn’t understand it. If you haven’t read the book, that link will introduce the main idea.

    What really struck me then, which has only increased over the last few years, is that there is now a huge disconnect between the views of most politicians and the media and most working class people. It’s a problem which cuts across the whole political spectrum – left and right. Labour, the party which used to be known for advocating for workers rights, has moved onto a more ‘progressive’ ideology. Paul Embery recently wrote about this in his book Despised (subtitle: “Why the modern left loathes the work class”).

    It does seem to me that the ordinary, working-class British people do not have a voice advocating for them in politics at the moment. They are simply seen as a problem to be solved (by re-educating them to be less racist, for example). They are only convenient when politicians want to score votes in traditional working-class areas.

    Sadly, that distinction even applies in the church: I think the church has failed the working-class community. The church has become too middle-class and out of touch, and it tends to only reflect middle-class concerns and not God’s. I’ve been in meetings of clergy where it was virtually assumed that everyone shared the same Guardian-reading worldview. A few years ago, in one of my final curacy meetings, a curate colleague of mine said to someone who was moving overseas: “Remember us on this island… with the Tories.” She said it without any embarrassment or irony whatsoever. That strikes me as perfectly summing up the attitude of a majority of the CofE.

    Lockdown and the working class

    One of the points which I’ve seen several people make about lockdowns is the way that it’s a very middle-class concern. The people who can work from home are generally middle-class professionals. Most working-class people have been out working through most of the last year. J.J. Charlesworth said on Twitter:

    Now obviously there are problems when trying to define ‘working class’ and ‘middle class’. The boundaries are very blurred. But I think there’s more than a grain of truth in this.

    The people running the country tend to be people who are in comfortable jobs. They tend to be living in nice houses with gardens. In general they don’t have to deal with living in a one-bedroom flat with four children who are trying to share one laptop for home schooling.

    Most of the people I know who are most pro-lockdown are fairly comfortably off. By contrast, the people I know who have been working through the lockdown tend to be a bit more blase about it. (I guess you’d have to be!). Before Christmas we had an electrician come round. We chatted a bit, and he said something like “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but…” This isn’t an isolated occurrence by any means. I’ve spoken to several people, e.g. at the school gates, who have many reservations about the lockdowns.

    Back to Brexit: a reason for optimism?

    I’ve mentioned Brexit a few times now. I think Brexit is fascinating because it exposed the divide that was there in society (e.g. somewheres / anywheres). It had been there for a long time, but didn’t really come to the fore until 2016.

    But here’s the thing: Brexit happened. It happened against all the odds – despite the fact that the establishment thought it was a stupid idea. Despite the fact that powerful people sought to use just about every trick in the book to undermine it. The Conservatives won a huge majority in the last election, largely on the promise that they would “get Brexit done”. Labour’s second-referendum idea turned out not to be a vote winner, neither was the Lib Dems “bollocks to Brexit” slogan.

    The "Bollocks to Brexit" bus

    When the people of this country were given a choice, they voted for Brexit.

    I think that this fact alone should give us hope that people can and will turn against the lockdowns. But there are a few other reasons for confidence.

    Other reasons to be optimistic

    • The Daily Mail has run some fantastic skeptical articles over the past few months (and it has people like Peter Hitchens writing for the Mail on Sunday, who has been staunchly anti-lockdown since the beginning). The Mail has just about the biggest circulation and reach of any newspaper, so this is not a trivial thing.
    • The lockdowns have had a massive effect on our lives which we’ll be feeling for some time to come. This is unlike something like the Iraq war. That was something which happened a long way away and hasn’t had so much of an impact on us. By contrast, we will each be feeling the impact of lockdown for decades – economically of course, but also in terms of mental health, social anxiety, people who died due to delayed treatment / screening etc. Every day we will be confronted with the enormous cost of lockdown. I think this will be a huge incentive not to simply brush it under the carpet but to hold those responsible to account.
    • There are various new political movements rising up against what’s been happening. The one I am particularly interested in is Laurence Fox’s Reclaim Party (interestingly, Laurence Fox announced today that he was running for Mayor of London). He is standing up not just against lockdowns but against the woke takeover of society. (I wrote about Laurence Fox last year). It seems that what has happened with lockdowns has actually galvanised a political reaction.

    Finally, I think there is a theological angle to all this, which I will finish with.

    The theological angle

    Over the last few years I’ve really got stuck into the Psalms. I try to recommend everyone to read a Psalm every day (I did a video about this a while back). Last year I went through the Psalms from the start, and Psalm 12 really jumped out at me:

    1 Help, Lord, for no one is faithful any more;
    those who are loyal have vanished from the human race.
2 Everyone lies to their neighbour;
    they flatter with their lips
    but harbour deception in their hearts.
3 May the Lord silence all flattering lips
    and every boastful tongue –
4 those who say,
    ‘By our tongues we will prevail;
    our own lips will defend us – who is lord over us?’
5 ‘Because the poor are plundered and the needy groan,
    I will now arise,’ says the Lord.
    ‘I will protect them from those who malign them.’
6 And the words of the Lord are flawless,
    like silver purified in a crucible,
    like gold refined seven times.
7 You, Lord, will keep the needy safe
    and will protect us for ever from the wicked,
8 who freely strut about
    when what is vile is honoured by the human race.

    My own feeling is that we are living in a Psalm 12 moment. We are living in days when ‘everyone lies’ – lies are the stock-in-trade of our media and political class. (I’ve talked about this in my post about truth). They have no fear of God, they don’t believe in any absolutes – exactly as Francis Schaeffer foretold.

    And what we are seeing is the poor plundered and the needy groan: I think the government are actually inflicting great harm upon our society, especially the poorest and most needy. People who are living in one-bedroom flats with four children, people living in care homes who are unable to see visitors, people who have lost jobs and livelihoods. This was happening to an extent before the lockdown, but the lockdown has exposed it for what it is.

    For a while now I’ve been thinking and praying for a new reformation – we need root and branch reform of the church, politics, and society in general. (Interestingly, the late principal of my theological college was praying towards a new reformation of the church). I think the Lord may be answering that prayer with these lockdowns.

    I think the technocrats have stepped over a red line, they have inflicted great harm upon people they have been entrusted with. But the Lord sees and he is not silent. We have been governed by fools for long enough (a fool in the Biblical sense – that is, someone who rejects the Lord and his ways). I believe the Lord is coming to raise up a government and a society which does honour him.

    I’ll finish with some words from Ezekiel 34, where the Lord speaks against shepherds who have not cared for the sheep:

    ‘“Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, because my flock lacks a shepherd and so has been plundered and has become food for all the wild animals, and because my shepherds did not search for my flock but cared for themselves rather than for my flock, therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: this is what the Sovereign Lord says: I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for my flock. I will remove them from tending the flock so that the shepherds can no longer feed themselves. I will rescue my flock from their mouths, and it will no longer be food for them.

  • Will Lockdown be the end of “experts”?

    Will Lockdown be the end of “experts”?

    A few years ago Michael Gove made his infamous statement: “people in this country have had enough of experts”. At the time I think I found it vaguely amusing – at the time, there were a lot of experts who had been weighing in about the EU. But over the last few months it’s come back to me more and more. It does seem like the last year of our lives has been government by experts. The proper word for it is technocracy.

    What is technocracy? This is how Wikipedia puts it:

    Technocracy is a system of government in which a decision-maker or makers are elected by the population or appointed on the basis of their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge.

    So a technocracy is government by scientific or technical experts, rather than democratic representatives. Perhaps over the last few months, the thought has popped into your mind (as it has mine): “When did we elect SAGE to govern us?”

    But this is not a new problem. We’ve been living in a kind of technocracy for a while now. The roots of it go back decades. But, for people of my generation, the EU is maybe the biggest symbol of technocracy.

    Technocracy and Brexit

    Michael Gove’s original comments about “experts” were made in the context of Brexit. Looking back now, it’s fascinating how almost the whole of the establishment were against Brexit. Politicians, the media, even the Archbishop of Canterbury, all spoke out against Brexit. They said that leaving the EU would be bad for us as a country, that there would be terrible consequences.

    Brexit was generally considered a Bad Idea by the movers and shakers in the world. The people who know things. You know… the Experts. The economists were telling us how terrible things would happen. Terrifying predictions were made about job losses, about how companies would simply up and leave the UK. World War Three would break out. (Not exaggerating – I seem to remember David Cameron saying something to that effect).

    The experts were united: leaving the European Union was a Bad Idea, and how DARE the silly little people vote the wrong way. How dare the people disregard the wisdom of the Experts! Some of the papers hardly even bothered to disguise their contempt for Brexit voters (something I’ve written about before). “Did these people not know what would happen if we voted to leave? Didn’t they hear all the terrible doom-laden predictions of the Experts?”

    Every time there was some Brexit-related bad news, many of the media class would roll their eyes and say “I told you so! I told you it would be a catastrophe!” Almost as if they wanted it to fail simply so they could be proved right.

    These predictions of doom seem not to have come to pass, not yet anyway. In fact, yesterday I read an astonishing article in the Guardian (the same Guardian which has been pretty much anti-Brexit since the beginning): “I hate to say it, but Britain’s doing OK. Even Germany envies us…” Things seem to be going far better than even most Brexiteers could have hoped for. How could that be, when the Experts told us the opposite would be the case?

    Vaccine rollout has not been an EU success story.

    Technocracy and Lockdown

    It does seem to me there are a lot of parallels between what happened around Brexit and what has happened over the last year about lockdown:

    • The Experts are constantly terrifying the government, not to mention the public, with doom-laden predictions about what might happen unless we take a particular path. The most recent example is the government ditching plans to lift the lockdown before Easter because Sage modelling predicted 55,000 more deaths if they did.
    • At every point the government have made clear that they are following or being guided by “the science”, which really means the particular group of Experts they have on Sage.
    • Almost the entirety of the establishment are behind the Experts.
    • There does seem to be a high correlation between the people who were most vehemently anti-Brexit and the people who are most strongly pro-lockdown.

    Of course there are some differences. A lot of people who were pro-Brexit are also pro-lockdown, in my opinion largely because they’ve been terrified by the government’s fear campaign. But I think the similarities are striking. We in the UK now live in a technocracy.

    So, what’s wrong with that? Surely it’s best to let the people with particular expertise make the decisions? They may get it wrong sometimes, but isn’t it best to listen to them? To answer that question, let’s think about technocracy from a Christian perspective.

    A Christian response to technocracy

    Are the technocrats trustworthy?

    Neil Ferguson

    One of the problems with technocracy from a Christian perspective is that the Experts are as flawed as the rest of us. In my previous post I talked about Francis Schaeffer’s book The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century. This is exactly the point that Schaeffer makes – a man may wear a white coat, but he is still a fallen man. Science may make claims to objectivity but, sadly, in the real world it is still subject to social pressure and bias.

    I think this is what we’ve seen over the past few months. For example, Neil Ferguson (who became known as ‘professor lockdown’ because his modelling team at Imperial College was instrumental in the government’s decision to lockdown) was unable to keep lockdown rules himself. He resigned from Sage after breaking quarantine rules to have an affair. (Although he appears to be back on Sage, let’s leave that for the moment).

    We’ve seen numerous examples of this: experts who call for tough measures have themselves not been able to keep to those measures. But I think there is an even deeper issues with technocracy.

    An alternative saviour

    C.S. Lewis was, in my opinion, one of the most insightful men of the twentieth century. He, along with Francis Schaeffer, have predicted much of what has gone on to happen. Let me quote you some of his 1958 essay Is Progress Possible?

    On just the same ground I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They ‘cash in’. It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science.

    Lewis says that government in the name of science is tyranny. Why? Let’s think about it: one of our society’s greatest fears is death. It’s got to the point where we just try to brush it under the carpet as much as possible. We all know that everybody dies, yet we pretend that it’s not the case. In a society like that, what happens when a scientist comes along who tells you you can save thousands of lives simply by following a particular course of action? If people are genuinely scared of death, the power of the scientists will be almost unlimited. There will be nothing people won’t do in the name of the science, as long as it saves them from death.

    And, as the old maxim goes, “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. A scientist who starts out with the best possible intentions can be corrupted by the power. Imagine them thinking “just how many lives could be saved if we just did…?” If the only goal is extending the duration of our lives, this is probably scientifically possible in ways which are highly dubious and unethical. This is what happens when you hand over control to science.

    Science is a great tool but a terrible master.

    What about values?

    And this brings me to the final point. Let me quote once again from C.S. Lewis’ essay:

    Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do so-and-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man. [My emphasis]

    That last sentence I think is the clincher.

    Let’s say a special life support machine was designed. It could keep a human being alive for 200 years. The only snag is, it could only keep you that long in a comatose state. You’d be technically alive, but unable to actually live. Would that be the kind of life worth living?

    As C.S. Lewis says, that’s not a question for science. It’s a quality of life question, which can’t be answered by purely scientific means. Scientists can tell us what may lengthen or shorten our lives, but whether it’s worth doing on those terms is simply not a question they can (or should) answer.

    Over the last twelve months, in order to keep us safe, we as a country have been under various legal restrictions as to who we can see. At the time of writing, it’s still illegal to meet someone – even outside (unless you’re going for a walk). Parents and grandparents have been forbidden from seeing their children and grandchildren. People have been unable to see elderly relatives in care homes. Young children and babies have been unable to enjoy cuddles with their families and all the social interaction they need at that age.

    The government have effectively decided, following the science (as they always make clear) that our safety from a particular virus is of more value than our mental health and wellbeing, than businesses, than our normal lives. Is that the correct decision? Well, it’s certainly not one that scientists can answer. I for one am angry that the decision was made on our behalf to keep us safe, when in many ways it has done anything but.

    The end of Experts?

    All this is rather depressing. But I think there are signs of hope. As lockdown goes on, I think people are beginning to ask more questions. People are beginning to ask whether the lockdowns are really worth it. For example, a lot of people are looking over to other countries who have had less restrictive lockdowns and seeing that they haven’t fared any worse:

    There is a growing body of scientific evidence (see also here and here) that lockdowns do very little except cause unconscionable harms.

    People are also beginning to ask questions about the number of deaths. Slowly but surely, people are waking up to the fact that maybe the Experts are not infallible.

    As I said before:

    My suspicion is, when all is said and done, that the government (aided and abetted by the media) will have done nothing but make things worse. Lockdowns, masks, closing down businesses, everything. Of course, at the moment we can’t know for sure.

    My hunch is that the next few months and years will see the whole government strategy over the past 12 months taken apart, piece by piece. I suspect we will see at every point how the measures taken were not made on a sound scientific basis but from panic and a desire to be seen to be doing something.

    I sincerely hope and pray that the Experts will be shown up for what they are. I also hope those people who gave the Experts unquestioning loyalty will do some serious soul searching.

    The government we need

    The government we need is a government who knows what is truly important. A government with principles – not just Experts. I believe a government with principles would have stood up against the lockdown and gone with something more like the UK’s previous pandemic plan (which was ditched in March 2020. The previous plan didn’t include lockdowns). Perhaps a government with principles might have been more loath to trust a strategy from the Chinese Communist Party – not known for its good record of human rights.

    At the end of the day, as Francis Schaeffer says, there has to be some absolute. If you don’t have an absolute, there can be no true knowledge. The Bible says:

    The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge,
    but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

    Proverbs 1:7

    The fount of all expertise is the fear of the Lord. That’s the primary kind of expertise that the government needs: not an expertise in science, or technology, or politics – but an expertise in the fear of the Lord. If we get that right, everything else will follow.

  • Schaeffer on 2021

    Schaeffer on 2021

    “How could a book written 50 years ago so accurately make sense of what’s happening today?” Those were my thoughts as I read Francis Schaeffer’s book The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century. I’ve mentioned Francis Schaeffer a few times lately – I’ve discovered his writings over the last couple of years, and they have been immensely helpful to me. (I wrote a post on Understand the Bible about why you should read True Spirituality which you might also like.)

    A few weeks ago, I read a post over on the Gospel Coalition, Francis Schaeffer Warned Us About 2020. I decided to read the book on the strength of that review, and it was well worth it. I’d like to add my own thoughts here, because I think Schaeffer really hits the nail on the head when it comes to our current cultural moment. Even though he was writing 50 years ago, I think he saw things happening in society which have grown and come to fruition.

    Diagnosing the problem

    The first step is to diagnose the problem. Schaeffer saw that the problem lies ultimately in a society rejecting God. Everything wrong about society flows from that one single thing. In the first chapter of the book, he outlines briefly his thesis (which is developed in more detail in The God Who is There and Escape From Reason, both of which are part of the Trilogy).

    This is what he says:

    If we do not begin with a personal Creator, eventually we are left (no matter how we string it out semantically) with the impersonal plus time plus chance. We must explain everything in the mannishness of man and we must understand all of the complexity of the universe on the basis of time plus chance.

    What he means by “the mannishness of man” is man made in the Image of God. That is, Christians believe that human beings are not random products of evolution, but made in God’s image to love and worship him. We are more than simply biological machines! But, if a society removes a personal Creator, you end up with having to explain everything in terms of biology or physics (etc). It is all, as he says, “time plus chance”. If you remove God, there can be no other explanation.

    But why do we still hold onto some Christian values?

    They keep thinking in the old way as a memory of the time before the Christian base was lost in this post-Christian world. However, the majority in the middle class have no real basis whatsoever for their values since they have given up on the Christian viewpoint. They just function on the ‘memory’.

    Christian values still hang around – but we’ve ditched the thing that gave then any basis. Once you ditch Christianity, there’s no real reason that Christian values should stick around. The key point for Schaeffer is that Western society has abandoned God, and whatever still remains of Christianity is a simply a memory.

    Western society has abandoned God, and whatever still remains of Christianity is a simply a memory

    What happens when you lose Christianity

    An expert totalitarianism

    So what happens to a society when you abandon God? Here’s where it starts to get interesting with respect to what’s happening at the moment. Here Schaeffer refers to John Kenneth Galbraith’s book The New Industrial State:

    Culture has lost its way and we should now have somebody new to direct it. Who should direct it? Galbraith’s answer was and is: the academic and especially the scientific elite, plus the state. To those who know Plato, it all sounds very familiar. The philosopher kings are to be reinstated.

    Once God is taken out of the picture, society needs roots – it needs direction. Schaeffer senses that the direction is going to come from a new elite made up of experts. The scientists and the academics are going to be in charge, with the power of the state. And it will need to be the power of the state:

    If we have an academic, scientific, state elite without any controls upon them, without any outside universal to guide them, it will undoubtedly lead in the direction of an Establishment totalitarianism.

    If an elite are in charge without any controls – an ‘outside universal’ (i.e. God), then there can be no moral absolutes. They will do whatever they think is best, even if that means imposing restrictions on a whole population under the threat of prison.

    So, if a group of scientists decide that the best way of saving lives is to lock 67 million people in their homes for a year, then that is what they will do.

    Another man who understood this and saw this coming was C.S. Lewis – see this post by Graham Shearer.

    Quote from C. S. Lewis

    The totalitarianism of the New Left

    Schaeffer also saw the rise of the New Left. He doesn’t really go into detail about the values of the New Left, but he does say “Here is the complete opposite to the Free Speech movement – a few hundred tell many thousands they must be still”. It’s a movement which is opposed to the free expression of ideas – certain ideas are ‘correct’, and others are forbidden.

    This, too, is a totalitarianism:

    Some have quit the New Left because it has dawned on them that they are building a new fascist regime, a new fascism in the sense that an elite without any controls upon it, with no universals to impose upon it, is telling everyone else to shut up and listen to them alone.

    I find this absolutely fascinating looking at what has happened over the last few years with ‘woke’ ideology, which I’ve talked about before e.g. about Cancel Culture. The ‘woke’ like to call other people fascists, but the reality is they behave like fascists themselves: they do not tolerate any other opinions, they want to prevent people being able to express their ideas in the public square. This has happened because – again – they have “no universals” (i.e. God). There is no absolute right and wrong.

    We are left with a choice between which kind of totalitarianism we want: the New Left or an Establishment elite:

    This, then, is the situation. Whether it is a Left Wing elite or an Establishment elite, the result is exactly the same. There are no real absolutes controlling either. In both cases one is left with only arbitrary absolutes set by a totalitarian society or state with all the modern means of manipulation under its control.

    When you free yourself from the control of a universal – i.e. God – Schaeffer foresaw exactly what would happen. You end up with a small group of people trying to demand ideological conformity (the New Left), or you end up with rule by experts.

    The silent majority

    Most of us are not part of the Establishment Elite or the New Left. So what happens to everyone else – the Silent Majority? Unfortunately, the Silent Majority – unless they are Christians “standing in the stream of historic Christianity”, who have absolutes – do not fair well:

    the Silent Majority are living on the memory of the practical advantages that Christian culture gave but who themselves have no base for these advantages. Their values are affluence (they are practical materialists) and personal peace at any price. Having no base, no absolutes, most of them will compromise liberty any time that they are finally forced to choose between their affluence and personal peace on the one hand and the giving up of a piece of liberty on the other.

    So the Silent Majority, at least those who do not hold to any absolutes, only have the values of affluence and personal peace. When these things are threatened they will give up their liberties. This is how totalitarianism comes in: when people’s core values are threatened, they will accept the state taking power upon itself to resolve it. Totalitarianism always comes in on the back of rapturous applause, because people believe it is going to sort out the issues which need to be sorted out. Unfortunately, it never ends well.

    So if the silent majority opt for totalitarianism, what about evangelicals?

    The danger is that the evangelical, being so committed to middle-class norms and often even elevating these norms to an equal place with God’s absolutes, will slide without thought into accepting the Establishment elite.

    Schaeffer saw that the church 50 years ago had become very middle-class. If that was the case then, how much more so today? I think part of the problem over the last twelve months has been the connection of the church with the establishment. Going along with lockdowns has been seen to be the ‘correct’ thing to do which all right-thinking people agree with. (You could say something similar about other ideas, such as “Brexit is a terrible thing”). Challenging lockdowns is a costly business, personally and professionally.

    Why is it that the church – nationally at least – has done little over the last twelve months apart from repeating government mantras about keeping everybody safe? One could be forgiven for thinking that the church doesn’t really believe in the resurrection, or that God is sovereign over all things and protects his people. Is it because the church has simply become another arm of the establishment? Perhaps the church wishes to keep its middle-class respectability and status rather than be obedient to Christ.

    Everything is manipulation

    The final thing which I want to touch on is how everything, including science, is about manipulation rather than truth. This flows directly from taking God out of the equation: once there is no absolute, there is no absolute truth. Schaeffer gives the example of a scientist who did not believe in a particular theory of evolution, not because of evidence but because he wanted not to be racist. He goes on:

    This is a non-objective, sociological science. Conclusions are determined by the way a scientist wants the results to turn out sociologically. It is a science which will manipulate society by the manipulation of scientific ‘fact’ … Beware, therefore, of the movement to give the scientific community the right to rule. They are not neutral in the old concept of scientific objectivity. Objectivity is a myth that will not hold, simply because these men have no basis for it.

    This is exactly where we’ve come to in society now. The whole notion of truth, even scientific truth, is out of date. I have talked about this a couple of times recently – about political truth and covid.

    It’s no surprise that science should be wielded as a political tool. At every point over the last twelve months, our government have said they are “following the science”. But so much of the time, as I have tried to make clear in other posts, science has been given as a pretext to justify a particular political course of action.

    Science has been co-opted to serve a political agenda, because we are not dealing with absolute truth any more. This flows directly from our society’s rejection of God.

    What is the solution?

    Schaeffer outlines three ways that Christians need to respond:

    Firstly, recognise that co-belligerents are not allies. Too often I think Christians equate a particular political perspective with the Kingdom of Heaven. Schaeffer cautions us that, even if we may have the same aims as a political movement, there is a difference between being co-belligerents and allies. We must stand up for what is right wherever that may be – e.g. on the political right or left. We are not of this world. Schaeffer says we should think like this:

    I stand alone with God, the God who has spoken in the Scripture, the God who is the infinite personal God, and neither of your two sides are my side. And if I seem to be saying the same thing at some one point, understand that I am a co-belligerent at this particular place, but I am not an ally.

    Secondly, we need to take truth seriously. In a generation where there are no absolutes, where even science has become manipulative, we need to take our stand on the truth. Schaeffer says:

    We must practise the truth even when it is costly… this is a time to show to a generation who think that the concept of truth is unthinkable that we do take truth seriously.

    I have talked about this before in my post on truth, so I will direct you to there for a more detailed discussion.

    Thirdly and finally, we need to practise true Christian community. Schaeffer says:

    With an orthodoxy of doctrine there must equally be an orthodoxy of community. Our Christian organisations must be communities in which others see what God has revealed in the teaching of his Word.

    In other words, we need to practice what we preach. We need to be a community where the truth is not only honoured, but shown in the relationships we have with each other. We need to live by the truth, not just profess it with our mouths.

    Ultimately, this is the way to win back a generation that has wandered away from God: showing the world – not just proclaiming – what it means to walk with God. If we only talk about God but don’t walk with him, nothing will change. But real change can happen when we actually show to the world what kind of a difference God makes.

  • What Conservative Evangelicals get wrong about preaching

    What Conservative Evangelicals get wrong about preaching

    I have spent pretty much my entire life going to evangelical churches. These are churches where the sermon is often the ‘main event’ in a service. This was especially true in the church I attended before going to theological college. There, a very high value was placed on having “good” preaching – it was really what the church was known for. The vicar at the time said he used to spend about twelve hours per week preparing the Sunday sermon. One person said to me that he travelled a long way to come because there were no other churches close to him which had “good” preaching. It was a church that was known to have “good” preaching, and – perhaps because it was near a university town – people would come to hear the “good” preaching.

    This seems to be a common theme among conservative evangelical churches (which I’ve talked about before on this blog). So the motivation behind the Proclamation Trust, for example, is to promote expository preaching – that is, preaching which aims to let the Bible set the agenda. They have whole conferences (some of which I’ve been on) which are dedicated to help with preaching the Bible. So much time and effort is spent on making sure that your preaching is as good as it can be.

    The default assumption seems to be that you should spend as long as possible preparing your sermon, over several sessions. This is reinforced by the people who speak at conferences (such as Vaughan Roberts, who I mentioned in my post about the EMA) saying that they spend several sessions over several days preparing to preach. You need to painstakingly analyse sentence flow diagrams, consult weighty commentaries, think about interesting ways to communicate. You really need to make sure you get into the text, so you can preach the main point clearly.

    There’s a huge amount of pressure to make sermons good. But I do wonder whether there is something lacking.

    A bit of background

    I came to the church I am now part of as a curate, straight from theological college. The church was (and is) conservative theologically and Biblically based. However, it is not one of the churches which people know by name – it’s not one of the ‘network’ conservative evangelical churches.

    One of the things which struck me early on was the preaching. Our vicar (now retired) was a very good speaker – but I don’t think his sermons would be very ‘Proc Trust’. His sermons were always based on the Bible passage and theologically orthodox. But I think sometimes they were a bit of a rush job – he was so busy during the week with his various jobs: at one time he was the Rural Dean of TWO deaneries (32 parishes!), and he was always busy pastorally. I once took a day to prepare a sermon and he said, “Enjoy it while you have the time!”

    Portrait of C.H. Spurgeon
    C. H. Spurgeon

    He had a very different style as well. Sometimes he would take the passage as a starting point and then ‘leap off’ to talk about something else – always Biblical! But there were quite a few occasions where I thought, “I agree with that, but I don’t think I would make that point from this passage”. In fact, his style reminded me a little of Spurgeon (another man who, despite being nicknamed ‘the prince of preachers’, would probably not preach ‘Proc Trust’ approved sermons!).

    The other thing that struck me was that the church was (and remains) a very loving and generous church family. Many in the church family did not simply hear the gospel, but they believed it as well. The Holy Spirit was and is at work in the hearts and lives of many people. People love the Lord, and each other. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture – as with any church, there are many flaws. It’s what you would expect from a church made up of sinners! But, nonetheless, there’s a lot of spiritual life, which – I have to be honest – I haven’t always experienced in conservative evangelical churches.

    All this has made me wonder.

    What’s the point of preaching?

    I started going to my previous church while I was a university student. One of my friends encouraged me to go. He said that, when you listened to a sermon there, you thought ‘wow’! He wasn’t wrong – the sermons opened my eyes to new ways of understanding the Bible. I encountered things such as Biblical Theology for the first time. It made a big impact on me as a young student. My understanding really grew.

    At the same time, I’m not sure that those days were times of great spiritual growth. Part of the problem is that I think the sermons encouraged understanding more than they encouraged obedience and trust. That is, I came to the church to hear the preacher help me to understand the Bible – and not so much to be encouraged in my trust in the Lord. Hearing the sermon was a bit like seeing a magician pull a rabbit out of the hat. You’d go into a sermon thinking, “I wonder what he’s going to get out of this passage.”

    The problem with this kind of preaching is that it encourages an intellectual view of the Bible. Preaching becomes simply communicating information to enable understanding. Now, of course, preaching is about understanding – I think of Romans 12:2, for example: “be transformed by the renewing of your mind”. Our hearts are changed as our minds are changed. But the two things – heart and mind – must go together.

    Liam Goligher recently wrote a wonderful summary of the difference between preaching and teaching on Twitter. There he said:

    Teaching provides things to learn and to do while preaching should leave us aghast and awed in the presence of God whose voice we have heard. Teaching must send us out to serve; preaching must lift us up to heaven!

    Preaching is something which lifts us up to heaven – I rather like that. Preaching is part of worship, as we build our relationship with the infinite-personal God (as Francis Schaeffer would put it). Teaching is more about understanding and information; preaching is about relating to and worshiping the God who made us. Of course, the two things are not mutually exclusive, but there is a distinction.

    When preaching becomes teaching

    A lecture

    I wonder whether part of the problem is that, for many conservative evangelical churches, ‘teaching’ and ‘preaching’ have merged into one. For example, I’ve heard it said by a few different people I know that good preaching should teach people how to read the Bible. That’s probably true. But I don’t think that should be the end goal. Sermons shouldn’t primarily be to teach believers theology, but to encourage them with the gospel that they may lead a transformed life.

    Maybe part of the problem is because churches have stopped catechising new believers. I think many churches try to do everything in Sunday sermons – perhaps because they do not realise there is another way. They tacitly assume that people will learn everything they need to through studying the Bible in sermons and home groups – rather than intentionally catechising people in the faith.

    Now, I do appreciate that every doctrine you would learn in a catechism you could also teach while preaching through a book of the Bible. But I think the goal of a catechism is different to the goal of preaching: catechesis is more about teaching. If you’re catechising people about the doctrines of grace, preaching can focus not so much on teaching those doctrines but encouraging people in their walk with the Lord using those doctrines as a foundation.

    I would say preaching is not about teaching people something from the Bible, but applying it to their hearts: encouraging people with the gospel, so that they go back to their lives with confidence to face with coming week. It’s not to teach people those doctrines but to encourage people with them. There’s an important difference.

    Our greatest need

    Robert Murray M’Cheyne, the 19th Century Scottish pastor, once said:

    Robert Murray M'Cheyne: "My people's greatest need is my personal holiness"

    Over the last seven years since I was ordained, I have come to believe that this is absolutely true. I’ve come to truly understand that the Word is not something which must simply be comprehended on an intellectual level but allowed to change our hearts. Books such as True Spirituality by Francis Schaeffer have really helped me understand this.

    A sermon is not about a transfer of information. It’s not about me reading the passage, understanding it, and then communicating that to others. It’s about the Word of God speaking to us, as Christians. I am not helping people to understand the Bible – I am helping people to apply it to our lives, now, as one Christian to another. It’s more than information – it’s God applying his word to our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

    Occasionally in preaching classes I’ve been given the advice, “First preach the sermon to yourself”. This is very good advice. If you can’t preach the sermon to yourself first, if it does nothing for you, then it won’t do anything for those who you’re preaching to. That is the exact thing we are communicating: not a piece of information, but a spiritual, life-transforming message.

    This is what I am getting at: the most important thing a preacher needs is not the intellectual grasp of a passage, but to be walking closely with the Lord. A simple man who has been humbled by the weight of his own sin and is depending on the Lord will accomplish far more than someone who has a lot of knowledge but is self-sufficient. In fact, a lot of knowledge could even be a barrier (1 Corinthians 8:1, “knowledge puffs up but love builds up”).

    What this means for sermon prep

    Over the last few years I’ve started to worry less about sermons. I don’t worry too much about spending hours refining my exegesis of the passage, or finding just the right words. That’s not to say I skimp on it! But I try to spend a bit more time dwelling on what the passage has to say to me as a Christian. How should I be changed as a result of this? What difference does it make to my life? In other words, the balance of my time in preparation has shifted in a more “spiritual” direction.

    I often find that a passage will speak into a particular situation going on in my life, or the world / church. I take that to be the voice of the Holy Spirit, helping me to direct what I say.

    Sermon preparation is not merely an intellectual exercise in terms of analysing sentence flow diagrams – it’s a spiritual excercise. We need to listen to the voice of the Spirit speaking to us through the words he inspired. That doesn’t mean we can skip over sentence flow diagrams (although I don’t usually do them for other reasons!) – but rather that at every point we need to be praying and asking God to guide us.

    Perhaps it would be helpful to see sermon prep as our whole lives before preaching: not just the actual tasks we complete in order to prepare a sermon, but our whole spiritual state before God. Spending time in prayer and humbling ourselves before God daily is sermon preparation. Speaking to people is sermon preparation. And so on. Perhaps that would help to get away from sermons being something we do intellectually to something we do with our heart, soul, mind and strength.

    Where does that leave us?

    A year ago I wrote about Jonathan Fletcher and Steve Timmis. There I said that part of the problem in conservative evangelical circles is that orthodoxy is reduced to holding a set of intellectual propositions. If you sign up on the dotted line of various doctrinal beliefs, you’re in the club.

    I think something similar could be said for preaching. Why is it that people like Jonathan Fletcher and Steve Timmis could do the things they did, without anyone really noticing? Is it because it’s possible to preach a “biblical”, exegetically-correct, theological sermon – without really preaching from the heart?

    Over the last few days I’ve been reading The Church at the End of the 20th Century by Francis Schaeffer. I’ve really benefitted from reading his works, and I’d recommend them to anyone. One of the things he says in the book is that everything starts with relating to the God who is there. The whole reason we exist is because God made us and we are his, we are made for him. Without him, without relating to him, we are nothing. Our natural sinful condition is to think that we can cope without him. I think this can be true of spiritual exercises such as preaching.

    Yesterday I read this, which sums things up for me:

    Suppose that when we awoke tomorrow morning and opened our Bibles, we found two things had been taken out. Not as the liberals would take them out, but really out. Suppose God had taken them out. Suppose the first item missing was the real empowering of the Holy Spirit; and the second item, the reality of prayer. Consequently, following the dictates of Scripture, we would begin to live on the basis of this new Bible in which there was nothing about the power of the Holy Spirit and nothing about the power of prayer. Let me ask you something: If that were the case, what difference would there be today from the way we acted yesterday?

    If God is real, the Spirit is real, and prayer is real – our sermons should reflect that. My fear is that too often they don’t.

    Cover image is the EMA at the Barbican back in 2017, borrowed (without permission) from this page – sorry!

    Further reading…

    Ray Ortlund’s sermon on 2 Timothy 1:3-8 and then his seminar on suffering were very helpful for me in beginning to think about these things! (The seminar was what put me onto Francis Schaeffer in the first place). I think what he says about Reformed Christianity in an American context would apply to the conservative evangelical British context.

    Also I think Humble Calvinism by J.A. Medders is relevant.

  • Reflections on passing 100,000: Grief and Anger

    Reflections on passing 100,000: Grief and Anger

    Recently the UK passed a pretty grim milestone: we went over 100,000 covid deaths. The UK has one of the worst death rates in the world – according to Worldometer, we are currently number five on the list (if you sort by deaths per million population).

    The two most common reactions I’ve seen have been grief and anger. People are rightly grieving at the loss of life. And people are also angry at the government for allowing this to happen. I’ve seen a number of people calling for Boris Johnson to resign, for example.

    This is a difficult and sensitive topic. I appreciate that many people have lost a loved one to covid. I have been fortunate: although I know a few people who have been ill with it, no-one I know has (as yet) died of it. I will come back to the issue of grieving at the end. But for now I just want to address the anger.

    Should the government have done more?

    People are angry because they believe the government could and should have done more to stop covid. I think it’s true that there were measures which could have been taken that would have helped. For example, there was a foolish policy during the first wave of discharging people from hospitals into care homes without testing them or providing adequate PPE for care home workers. Over the coming months, I’m sure there will be some sort of inquiry into the government’s handling of covid, and I expect many of the mistakes that were made will be brought to light.

    At the same time, I think many of the things the government have done to combat covid have actually hindered rather than helped.

    Lockdowns, for example. There is a growing body of evidence that lockdowns do not actually work, or at least, if they do they make a very small amount of difference for an enormous cost. In all three lockdowns that we’ve had, it looks like the rate of infection was declining before the lockdowns were imposed.

    But it gets worse. Last Sunday, Peter Hitchens’ column asked “Is this really an epidemic of despair?” I think he’s onto something. I’ve known several people say they have friends or neighbours who have just faded away over this last 12 months. I can’t shake the feeling that the winter excess deaths we’ve seen may not have been caused by covid so much as the lockdown. If you isolate people from their friends, family and support networks, and prevent them from doing things which make life worth living, then surely that’s going to have an impact on their ability to fight infection.

    This is something which carries some scientific weight:

    Factors we found to be associated with greater risk of respiratory illnesses after virus exposure included smoking, ingesting an inadequate level of vitamin C, and chronic psychological stress. Those associated with decreased risk included social integration, social support, physical activity, adequate and efficient sleep, and moderate alcohol intake.

    So people who are most likely to get seriously ill of cold and flu viruses include people with “chronic psychological stress”. I wonder whether this might include being locked in for nearly a year. Maybe getting out and seeing friends and family is good for our health and general wellbeing, and would make people more able to withstand getting covid.

    My suspicion is, when all is said and done, that the government (aided and abetted by the media) will have done nothing but make things worse. Lockdowns, masks, closing down businesses, everything. Of course, at the moment we can’t know for sure.

    Can the government protect from a virus?

    Poster: Stay Alert, Control the Virus, Save Lives

    One of the things I’ve found most striking about the past year is that the government seem to have stepped into the role of protecting us from a virus very quickly. No-one seems to have noticed anything strange about this. I wonder if it’s because we Brits tend to see the government as being responsible if there’s a problem in society. Whenever there’s an issue, ultimately we blame the government.

    So, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that when there was a big problem – a new deadly virus – the government felt the need to step in to defend us from it. We expected it of them. We believed that it was possible to control a virus – they told us so.

    I fear that this is a lesson we may have had to learn the hard way. Perhaps a virus is just something that can’t be controlled – not by human beings, anyway. Humans and governments have limited power to change things. We can’t manage our way to a perfect world. When we try to create a perfect world through government – it always goes badly wrong.

    I wonder if that will be one of the biggest lessons of this pandemic – a lesson in humility. Maybe there are things which are simply out of our control.

    A lesson in Godly sorrow

    2 Corinthians 7:10 says:

    Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.

    It’s right to grieve and feel sorrow, but even more importantly is how we grieve. Sometimes God uses events like this pandemic to bring us to our senses. Maybe part of the problem is that we have made idols of our government and safety, when we should have been trusting in the Lord.

    As Psalm 118 puts it:

    8 It is better to take refuge in the Lord
    than to trust in humans.
    9 It is better to take refuge in the Lord
    than to trust in princes.

    The difficult part is, repentance involves recognising that we’ve been in the wrong. That isn’t an easy thing to do. We like to cling to our idols. We in the UK kill two covids each year in abortions (that’s over 200,000 per year). We love our sexual liberation so much, we’d be prepared to kill for it – just so long as it’s killing of a kind that society considers acceptable.

    In recent years we have even considered assisted dying, for example Lord Falconer’s Bill back in 2014. Fortunately there is less public support at the moment for assisted dying – but there is still significant support for it (apparently 84% of the public support the choice of assisted dying for terminally ill adults).

    It seems that we as a society only care about numbers of deaths when it’s covid deaths we’re talking about. We’re happy with the government sanctioning killing, so long as it’s the kind of killing we approve of.

    We need to grieve, but – more than that – we need to search our hearts and repent.

    It seems that we as a society only care about numbers of deaths when it’s covid deaths we’re talking about

    A prayer in time of plague

    Over the last few weeks in our midweek service, we’ve been using the Morning Prayer service from the Book of Common Prayer. I love the BCP because it doesn’t shy away from things like plagues. The world is seen through a Christian lens.

    This is the prayer from the BCP, which is for “the time of any common Plague or Sickness”. I would suggest if we as a nation could get down on our knees and pray this prayer with all sincerity, it would do far more good than any lockdown measures the government could ever introduce.

    O ALMIGHTY God, who in thy wrath didst send a plague upon thine own people in the wilderness, for their obstinate rebellion against Moses and Aaron; and also, in the time of king David, didst slay with the plague of pestilence threescore and ten thousand, and yet remembering thy mercy didst save the rest: Have pity upon us miserable sinners, who now are visited with great sickness and mortality; that like as thou didst then accept of an atonement, and didst command the destroying Angel to cease from punishing, so it may now please thee to withdraw from us this plague and grievous sickness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.