‘I love our house group’; this seems to have become our tagline (if ever a house group could have one). It’s often the comment that one of us will make once our evening together comes to a close.

Personally I get so much out of our time together and I really do love our house group. I’m always encouraged by how much we all put into it; practically, intellectually and spiritually. While some house-groups focus on hospitality and fellowship and others on worships and prayer our focus is God’s word.  We’ve worked through, chapter by chapter, a good number of books in the Bible since the house-group began approximately 3 years ago. We each take it in turns to lead a week, and it’s always great to see how much the person leading has put into preparing their session.  

A few weeks ago though we broke with tradition and, thanks to a wonderful suggestion by one lovely Tom Wynne-Morgan, we decided to share our testimonies of how we became Christians.

It was interesting to realise that although we’ve gotten to know one another really well over the past few years we’ve never actually taken the time to hear about how we each came to be ‘in love with God’.

 Hearing the uniqueness of each story, and how God met each of us in our different places, was very encouraging.  There are some similarities amongst our experiences; inspirational parents, time spent at Christian camps, the compelling actions of another Christian and, even amongst two people, a similar moment of realisation and commitment to God whilst starring out of a window.

I would certainly recommend other house-groups taking the time to do the same. It felt very intimate and we definitely shared a very special evening. It was, as Dale said on Sunday, great to ‘go back to our first love’.

We all enjoyed the evening so much that last week we decided to move onto ‘phase two’ and entitled this second session ‘why I’m still a Christian!’

This was once again a lovely time but many a question arose and a few tears shared! It was encouraging to hear of the specific times when God has realigned our lives and reminded us of our hope in Him but we also touched on some more challenging issues.

Just a few to consider; we’re called to be ‘childlike’ in our faith but what does it mean to be a ‘mature’ Christian. Does God call us to be black and white in our understanding of Him or is ok to have grey patches? Does being ‘busy’ for God really bring us any closer to Him? Any thoughts anyone?

Inevitably we didn’t manage to reach any firm conclusions about these issues and perhaps that’s the point.  As the church was reminded in Revelations (ch2:v4-5) we should simply go back to our first love. Ultimately it is God’s word, once again, that provides the answer.

We have planned a third session entitled ‘what would we like our faith to be like?’ (or maybe if we take God’s word as our focus it should be called ‘What should our faith be like’). I’ll let you know how it goes!

I was reminded that brokenness is magic stuff, says Charlie Parker.

It has been years since I went along to one of the Bear's evening services but Bridgette kindly invited me to speak last Sunday so along I went.

It blew me away. Firstly, let's take a moment to recognise the extraordinary work the evening service team is doing. The cooks did an amazing job at preparing food for dozens of people who all flooded through the door bang on time. Bex Keer seemed to be the appointed head chef but she had lots of helpers. (Richard Bell spent most of his time carefully cutting the tops of a big bowl of radishes even though nobody has eaten a bowl of radishes since the Great War.)

Declan and the other leaders did an amazing job connecting with the people who came. It is overwhelming to see how freely they are sharing their lives with people down on their luck. During the actual service Layton led beautifully, making time for everyone and controlling the chaos really well.

The people who came to eat and join in the service were universally nice to me. This despite the fact that I arrived like a visitor from a different planet in the back of a blacked-out Merc wearing a suit after spending the afternoon doing a series of interviews. (Luckily Fran had thought to give me a bag with some jeans and a T-shirt in.)

The first thought that I turned over in my mind when I arrived was a reflection on how little separated me from the people who walked in off the streets to take part in the service. I know the things they have to overcome in their lives are often greater than mine. They have to contend with drug addiction, violence, mental health problems and a range of other issues. Yet, there are things I need to overcome in my life too (being critical, eating too much, worrying too much...I could go on) and I can't help but wonder whether I have really made any more progress than them at facing up to my weaknesses and overcoming them.

This is not to denigrate the work of the Holy Spirit in my life in recent years. I dread to think what I would be like without him. But it is to recognise that we are all in this together, equally sinful and equally in need of God's help in our lives.

The thing on my mind by the time I left though was this: Brokenness is where stuff happens. I work so hard in my life to see off risks and paper over my own problems. Yet what you learn when you look at a group of people - many of whom have hit rock bottom - is that it is brokenness where the good stuff with God really takes place. We have to let ourselves be broken. We have to accept criticism and hardship knowing that it is the magic bullet, the golden nugget that can lead us closer to God.

If brokenness were a commodity then it would be mined like platinum and traded for a fortune. It is magic stuff. Why else would Jesus work so hard to stress the importance of brokenness in the Sermon on the Mount. He said: 'Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted'. He was not telling us to dance around happy when we are grieving or saying that he wanted to romanticise suffering. Not at all. He was simply saying that something happens when we get to the point of despair. Something magic.

The people who are touched by this magical intervention of God in their lives are very often not the most accomplished, not the most talented, or the most intelligent. They are often not even those whose personalities seem to lend themselves to 'niceness'. They are just the people who happened to be in that place of brokenness, looking up and crying out for God's help. That is all God needs to remember us.

Evening service team: keep it up! You are teaching us all.

What?

 Youth focused team to work at Cherish village with local children, plus visits to Watoto orphanages and other projects (where Fin now works). 3 day safari near Gulu, after visiting Watoto’s work there.

Opportunity to learn, serve and share love of God through both words and actions.

Who?

In order of priority…

14+ youth

11+ youth accompanied by a parent

Everyone else from the Bear who would like to be part of this challenge. Maximum size approx. 30.

When?

Last 2 weeks of August 2011, exact dates tbc.

How much?

Between £1,300-500 per person irrespective of age, though children under 11 may be less.

How much?????

Joint fundraising led by Bear Global team will happen over the year for all youth places (11+) with aim to fundraise £750 per youth. The remaining funds and places can be fundraised for outside the Bear family, or simply paid for.

When do I need to commit?

September 12^th 2010 when there will be a special meeting after church for everybody interested. You will need to pay a deposit of £100 per person by October 1^st (returnable if a place is not available).

Who can I talk to about this if I have questions?

Bex Keer, Iain Jones or Darryl Veldtman.

How do I learn more about Cherish and Watoto?

www.cherishuganda.org

www.watoto.com

The Global Team

July 2010

Ozymandias

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Scripture

Colossians 1: 15 – 27

I feel that the letter to the Colossians is the most important book in the bible. In it, St Paul condenses and consolidates all his teaching about Christ into one short message, and there is a wonderful symmetry about the whole story in that Colosse is the least important city Paul ever wrote a letter to. Colosse was a small city in Phrygia, in what is now Turkey. There were three cities beside one another: Laodicea – we are familiar with it from Revelation, a very rich centre of commerce, Hierapolis, a spa – the Leamington of the ancient world, and Colosse. Colosse was very much the poor relation of the three cities. It wasn’t far from Ephesus where St Paul spent a lot of time, but he didn’t start the church in Colosse, although he would have been a very influential figure in it. It was a gentile church, but there were lots of Jews in the city and that would have been a very important factor in why he had to write the letter.

The church in Colosse was beginning to lose its way. It was falling into heresy. One of the big mysteries of the New Testament - and by mystery I mean human mystery, rather than divine mystery – is what was the Colossian Heresy? Nobody knows for certain but the educated guess is that it had to do with Gnosticism.

Gnosticism is a belief that spirit alone is good, and because all matter is evil, there is no way that God could have created the earth. It also meant that Jesus could not be the son of God and be flesh and blood, so how could he sacrifice his body on the cross for us?

It also gave rise to two opposite but equally wrong ideas that if the body is evil, it should be starved, beaten and denied, or oppositely, it should be indulged and its urges satisfied because it wasn’t going to make any difference in the long run.

So what came out of this was a very intellectual approach to life. Because man -as matter - was so far away from God - as spirit - he must fight his way up a long ladder to get to God. There were all kinds of secrets, rituals, hidden passwords, and you really needed to know the rules if you wanted salvation. So the people who would get to God were a select few –the leadership and the intelligentsia. Salvation would come from intellectual knowledge. This sat comfortably with the rigid laws of the Jews, so there was a strange alliance between Jew and Gnostic as they tried to turn belief in Christ into a philosophy. It is also a philosophy which is gaining a foothold in today’s culture.

In this letter, Paul sets out to refute these ideas, because they were hugely threatening to the church. We must remember that Christianity was a new religion, not well established, and if these ideas had taken hold, who knows? Well God knows…

So Paul starts the counter-attack. Firstly he states explicitly that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. The ordinary, unlearned people would hear in this the echo of the creation story, when God made man in his image. In Genesis 1:27 it says “So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” So Paul is reminding us that man is made to be nothing less than the image of God. Paul uses the Greek word “eikon” for image. This can have two interpretations: a representation, or a manifestation. So it’s a really strong declaration by Paul that flesh is not evil in itself, but rather that man did not achieve his destiny because of sin. So when Paul says that by looking at Jesus we can see a representation of God that we can understand, he is also saying that by looking at Jesus we can see what man was meant to be, before the fall – the separation of man from God through sin.

He describes Jesus as supreme over all creation and that “In him all things hold together”. I feel we need to take this to heart in the twenty first century, where our lives are increasingly challenged – usually for the better - by technology. The laws of the universe – gravity, thermodynamics, genetics, - chemical, physical and biological originate in the divine.

I am now skipping forward to verse 27. “To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”  Paul uses great language – “glorious, riches, mystery”. He conveys the sense of God providing an inexhaustible supply of goodness and grace, and that every time he goes there, he finds something new and unexpected. In the New Testament, the word mystery is used to describe something that would be beyond our ability to discover without divine revelation. So it is a gift from God. “The hope of glory” - hope as joyous expectation and glory as eternal salvation. What I believe he is saying is that if Christ lives in you, then that is the reason to be certain of complete salvation.

I have a friend – a wonderful man who works with drug addicts and alcoholics. He was a successful hotelier in South Africa.  He is a Christian, and was very involved with his local church in Cape Town. They even let him speak - during the summer! But he is also an alcoholic and he slowly became alcohol dependent. And a little bit like a Greek tragedy, his life began to unravel. Like all alcoholics, it wasn’t a sudden fall from grace but rather a slow descent into Hell. He had to kick away all the props that supported him in his sin and addiction – his church tolerated his behaviour for a while, his colleagues at work covered for him, his wife and children suffered in silence and thought he would turn the corner and see the hurt he was causing. But in the end he managed to alienate all the people that loved him and many more besides, and he became homeless on the streets of Cape Town. He ended up sleeping, wrapped in a blanket, in a garden shed. He lay there one night shaking with delirium tremens – severe withdrawal from alcohol, sweating, shaking, hallucinating, - with nothing but a bible. He knew his bible and he was looking for some solace, something to hang on to, when his eyes fell on that verse: “To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

He had what he describes as a Eureka moment and he jumped up and ran down the street shouting “I have it! I have it!” He has never drank since and when I asked him what was different, he said it was when he realised that if the greatest power in the universe lived in him, how could he choose to live in the gutter. He also felt released from the need to judge and be judged. He realised he was equal: equal to the task of giving up the drink, equal to the task of living. He didn’t understand it in his head, but in his heart it made such simple sense. He knew nothing about heresies or where Colosse was, but he knew that Jesus lived in him and that he was a special beloved creation of God. I see this as proof that scripture is real and affects lives. Here is a promise from God, delivered when needed, to a gentile, and we see yet another life transformed by grace.

In the poem we read at the start, I used to imagine that Ozymandias died in agony, without friends or family, probably betrayed, like Julius Caesar. But now I have a different phantasy. I like to think that he may have had a Christian slave. He may have asked why this man is so patient and kind and full of grace. I imagine somebody telling him – with great trepidation - about God’s wonderful love for the human race. So perhaps there is a happy reason why the statue stood destroyed in the desert. Maybe Ozymandias asked God to give him the same gifts and he ended up leading his people to greener pastures to build a new life full of love for one another and love for Jesus.

Gravity didn’t make any sense to Isaac Newton until he saw the apple falling from the tree. Electricity doesn’t make any real sense until you turn on the light. The first phone didn’t make any sense until it rang the second phone. Likewise, Christ in you, the hope of glory, doesn’t make any sense until you see it. I see it here in the Bear all the time. I see it working with Brigitte every day. I see it in Paul and Iain and their passion for this church. I see it in Fiona and Emily’s passion for Bearcubs, Daniel’s worship, Tessa, Julie, Katherine, Silvia, Alice, Vickie, Layton, the people who cook every Sunday evening ….. I could go round this room…... I would love to name everybody here who has been that shining light for me at one time or another.

So my prayer is that all of you here continue to search out and be consumed by the spirit of God, that you wake up every morning secure in the fact that Christ – God, the creator – lives in you, and I pray that you will continue to shine – for me and for each other, and especially and for those of us who have not yet sought the revelation, those who have not yet taken it into their hearts, this knowledge of the indwelling of our saviour Jesus Christ and the hope of a glorious future for us all to choose to believe in.

Do you believe that God has a particular message for you at a particular time?

Or do you simply think that while God does speak its all in the book so whatever he says to you today is simply whatever you randomly choose to read?

I believe in a way that both these things are true. You can pick up the bible anywhere and if you are willing and ready God will speak to you. But I also think that there are particular messages he wants to convey at specific times. Every picture of God's intervention in the world shows that he has exactly the right word for the right moment.

Quite a lot of the time I have no idea what God is saying to me. I am lost behind a wall of doubt, fear, distraction and indifference (sorry about that). But the good news is that God can break through all of this incredibly easily if only I give a little bit of thanks and exercise a mustard seed of faith.

Today I do think I have an idea about what God is saying. Here's how I've picked up what I think it is. I was at a wedding the other week for my friend Chris - who by the way once worked very hard with me all through a summer digging a foundation at the old Bear building when we knocked the wall down to make the hall bigger. He was there when I dropped a bible verse chiseled onto a block of wood into the foundations as they set. He was also there when I realized that I had put in the wrong bible verse - one that prophesied doom. But we are not superstitious so move on...

Chris' pastor from Manchester preached at the wedding and said that the biggest tip he would give a newly-married couple was to remember what there love felt like at first. Whenever things get stale, he said, try to re-visit those feelings and experiences.

He gave this Bible verse from Revelations: 'Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first.'

This is part of a message God is giving to the church in Ephesus, a church that has started to grow up. Oddly rather than telling them to get better at growing up, to move on, to stop behaving like children, he tells them to return and do the things they did when they first came to know Jesus.

We are at a time now in the life of the Bear where many people will have felt not a little regret when they think back over the early life of our church. We have just lost the building in which we invested so much time, love and hope. Some of us will remember prayer walking around it, listening to prophesies about it, growing up in it. meeting our lovely spouses in it. We thought it would be the place from which we built our church for the long-term. As I began to think about things I did in the Bear nearly ten years ago when I was getting a youth work going and helping out as Jamie Reynolds set up a café and Julia first set up the gallery I think 'I was so young! We go so much so wrong and what has become of it now?'

The reality though is that I remember that what I had the courage to do all those years ago was exercise some faith, free from the fear of failure. I thought then that next year would be different for Deptford. God wants us to have new faith in that again. He wants us to be full of the hope and the faith we were full of the first time we walked into a church or walked to the front of a meeting to choose Jesus as our personal Saviour.

How is that possible you ask? So much has changed, we have been through so much. It is a reasonable point. Since those days I look back on a decade of triumphs and disasters, of expectations crushed and hope diminished and not a little personal tragedy. And yet, and yet, I feel something nagging in my gut telling me that I am not today the sum total of disappointment and failure, nor am I the sum of my success (because after all our church has grown since those days considerably).

There is something inside me that is offering me hope and it is is not my experiences. That thing of course is the Holy Spirit. Something extraordinary happens when the kingdom of God comes into our lives. We start to have hope where there should not empirically be hope. We start to believe in things almost as if we were children, taking emotional risks to believe in people that our world-wearied-selves would never take.

In short we start to believe that it is possible to see change even though we haven't yet seen evidence of that change. This is faith breaking through into our hearts. As we learn in Hebrews 11: ^''By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing where he was going.'

Well I don't really know where we are going either but I do know that the way we will get therw is by returning to do the things we did at the beginning. There is never never any shame for Christians in starting again at the beginning - its what you get to do when you are a new creation.