Phill Sacre

Tag: church

  • Why is the church obsessed with sex?

    It’s a legitimate question: if you’re an outsider, it looks like the church wants to talk about nothing else at the moment. One obvious answer to the question is that sex is the area of our culture which rubs up most obviously against the traditional Christian understanding – hence the clashes. In previous years there have been others, this is just the most obvious one for our society.

    But why, to continue the question, is the church so obsessed with its traditional view of sex and sexuality? In other words, why can’t the church just get with the programme? Why can’t the church just change its mind? One of the commenters on a previous blog post here asked me why I couldn’t just shut up about sexuality. Why is it such a big issue?

    The answer to that is essentially this: the debate about sex and sexuality within the church is a debate about the nature of God. It has massive implications. That might seem strange, but allow me to try and explain.

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  • The Church is wiser than our secular society

    A BibleOne of the articles that seems to have been doing the rounds on Twitter lately is “Our secular society is wiser than the Church” by Oliver Kamm (most recently I saw it tweeted by my friend @pandammonium). I often read articles online without responding to them, but sometimes one annoys me sufficiently that I feel the need to write something about it here.

    The article itself is pretty short, it won’t take a minute of your time to read, but the argument is basically that the church always lags behind societal attitudes. Frankly I find the thinking in the article so muddled I don’t quite know where to begin, but I’ll quote a few sentences and try to explain:

    Gay marriage will become established and there will come a time when few of its current opponents (including Archbishop Welby) will be exercised by the issue.

    This is unbelievably patronising. Kamm is basically saying, “There, there, dear – your petty and ridiculous objections to same-sex marriage will be forgotten in a few years when you’ve finally caught up with society – and you will.” In other words, “you’ll come round, just give it time”. It doesn’t deal with any of the objections to same-sex marriage (hereafter known as SSM); it just assumes that SSM is correct and that any objectors are purely irrational hatemongers who will come round.

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  • House, Marriage, and Grace

    Over the past few months, Mrs Phil and I have been watching through “House, M.D.” If you’ve never watched the series before, I can recommend it – it is pretty compelling! That said, some of the time it is a bit frustrating: the series as a general rule seems to buy into many of the popular misconceptions about relationships. One which particularly irks me is the idea that relationships seem to be totally in the hands of fate – “let’s get together and see how it works out.” Which is perhaps fair enough for a while, but after a few years – and even after getting married? No, that’s not how it works.

    I think all of this has got to me a bit more than usual because last year I read Tim Keller’s excellent book on marriage, and then earlier this year I read John Piper’s book “This Momentary Marriage” (which is also excellent, and currently available as a free PDF from that link). Couple that with the government’s discussions to redefine marriage and it seems that this year I’ve been thinking about marriage quite a lot! What does marriage mean? What does it teach us?

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  • Holiday Bible Club and Birthdayness

    It’s been a busy week for me! Just over a week ago, on the Sunday morning Phil and I headed down to St Simon Zelotes to see Mike Neville (former rector of our old church in Colchester), and then have lunch with the Nevilles and a couple of other people afterwards. It was a really nice morning, great to see Mike again and hear how they’re getting on. After that, we headed home and I jumped straight into the car to head up to Fordham (the aforementioned church in Colchester).

    I played guitar at Sunday@6 that evening, and then stayed around to help set up for Holiday Club: the reason I was in Colchester for the week! The Holiday Club ran from Monday to Thursday in the mornings. My role was basically to help out with ‘door security’ (i.e. making sure kids didn’t run out without parents), taking photos, and generally helping out with anything that was required. It was good fun, tiring but enjoyable! There were lots of smiling faces throughout the whole week – I think everyone had a good time.

    On the Monday afternoon, my stitches came out – it felt so much better to have them removed! The skin no longer felt tight, and it looked a lot more ‘normal’. (Now the black eye has basically gone and the wound looks like it’s healing nicely. Thanks for asking.)

    On Thursday evening, I drove down to Phil’s parents. Phil had spent a couple of days up in Preston with a friend, so it was good to see her again! On the Friday – my birthday – we headed into London to visit the Heatherwick Exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum. In case you didn’t know (I didn’t), Heatherwick is the company who created the Olympic Cauldron, as well as some other memorable designs including a new London bus. It was a fascinating exhibition actually, well worth going to see if you’ve got a spare couple of hours.

    Afterwards, we wandered down to Hyde Park and slowly walked back towards Waterloo through the various parks in London. It was a beautiful day, and great to be out!

    On the Saturday, Roz and Matt joined us and we went to play crazy golf in the morning (a new crazy golf course had opened locally), and then we basically tried to stay cool the rest of the day – mainly by not going out very much! Well, I didn’t go out very much anyway.

    Then, on Sunday morning we drove back to Colchester where I was leading the ‘all-age’ Holiday Club service. That seemed to go well – a few people said the enjoyed it afterwards. Then we headed over to Higham for the Fordham Church Family Picnic, and then back to church for Sunday@6. Then we came home to London.

    *phew* … it’s been a busy week! Today I am mainly suffering Olympic withdrawal symptoms (because it’s been such a busy week, I haven’t had time to have any withdrawal symptoms), watching re-runs of Top Gear on Dave (not yet but I will be…) and generally recovering a bit.

  • God’s Image and Women Bishops

    A few days ago I had a leaflet in my pigeon-hole at college entitled “Male & Female in God’s Image“. It was published by Reform, and (strangely enough) written by my placement supervisor. (He didn’t specifically give it to me, by the way; it was given to all students at Oak Hill).

    The main claim in the leaflet is that if we accept women bishops, then we will damage our understanding of the Trinity. This is what the leaflet says:

    Genesis 1:27 does not teach the sameness of men and women. In fact the asymmetry of the words used point to the differentiation in the Triune God which in turn lies at the basis of the differentiation between men and women.

    But if our society views men and women as having no significant differences and this is then pursued as an axiomatic principle within the Christian community, it is inevitable that our view of the nature of God will change.

    So, what we see is the asymmetry between male and female relationships being a sort of picture of the asymmetry in the Godhead. He goes on:
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  • Reverse Missionaries

    Over the past few weeks, we’ve been watching a mini-series on the BBC called “Reverse Missionaries”. Unfortunately it seems to have disappeared from the iPlayer, but the basic premise was that three people from countries which were influenced by British missionaries (Jamaica, Malawi, and India) have returned to the places where those respective missionaries were from to try and return the favour. So, for example, in the second episode a pastor from Blantyre in Malawi returned to Blantyre in Scotland, to a church which was struggling, and tried to engage with the local community in the same way that David Livingstone (who was from Blantyre in Glasgow) did in Malawi.

    Anyway, I have to say that I found the whole series very encouraging. Each of the churches that the reverse missionaries came to I think were ‘evangelical’ theologically, but in most cases had perhaps lost some of the desire for evangelism. In each case, the numbers at the church had dropped off significantly and there were very few young people there.

    What the reverse missionaries did was go out into the community, meet people, and bring them into the church community. I think my favourite was the first episode, where a Jamaican pastor came to a small town in Gloucestershire and by the end of the two weeks had managed to get a football team going, brought in a few new people to the church, and generally made an impact!

    Obviously, all of the reverse missionaries were not very British – I think I (and probably most British people) would generally not be very confident with going up to someone in the street and talking to them cold. But what struck me was that, in general, people were actually very receptive.

    There are a couple of things I took from watching the series:

    1. The gospel is the answer to what people are looking for. This is something which I knew on an intellectual level, but it’s great to see it actually happening in the real world. The first episode showed someone hurting; he needed to know that there was a purpose in his suffering and a promise of release. The second episode showed a woman who had lost her husband; she needed to know the promise of resurrection and eternal life. The third episode showed a divided community; what they needed to know was “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
    2. The things that the reverse missionaries did were not magical, or only doable by an elite few – all they did was care for people, and try to reach out to them with the message of the good news. Now clearly they were gifted with people, which is something I’m not, but at the same time reaching out to people with the message of the good news isn’t rocket science. Sure, there will be different ways of doing it depending on context, but the important thing is not to become insular. I think the churches featured had all become somewhat inward looking, and that’s the worst thing that can happen to a church.

    In general, in the midst of what’s been going on with secular society, HOTS and the like – it’s nice to be reminded (in an understated, unassuming way) that the good news is still good news, and that God is still working.

  • Sermon: Matthew 3:13-4:11 – “A New Israel and a New Adam”

    Tonight I preached a sermon at my placement church on Matthew 3:13-4:11. I don’t know whether it was recorded, I don’t know whether they have the facility to record there, so I’ve decided to upload the sermon as a PDF: you can download it below. That’s an approximation of what I said, by the way – I decided to preach from notes rather than a full script this time. (It seems to be working as well, my memory seems to be improving in that respect. It seems that you actually have to practice to improve your communication skills, who’d have thought it…)

    Matt 3v13-4v11 SermonDownload

    I had some positive comments on it after the service, so that was positive. I felt a bit more nervous about preaching there than I have done previously, probably because I didn’t really know people so well. When I was preaching at Fordham I did at least know most of the people in the congregation. Still, preaching to a group of people who I don’t know is something I will need to get used to, so it’s not bad to have some experience in that respect.

    Next week I’m preaching in chapel – it’s only a “Monday Meditation” (where basically the goal is to do as little talking as possible and get everyone to meditate while saying ‘Ommmm…’) but it’s still a pretty daunting prospect preaching to a bunch of people who are all studying theology and  training to work in Christian ministry. People who have, for the most part, probably got more experience and learning under their belt than I have. Still, hey ho, experience is experience.

    Hope you enjoy the sermon, if you read it. Let me know what you think.