Seven up…

1) Is there forgiveness for Liam Neeson’s sin? – It was fascinating to see the response to Liam Neeson’s ‘confession’ in the media this week. Striking to see the way it reveals a world that has little confidence room for grace. As Alan Jacobs has said, “When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness.”

2) The Most Attractive Quality in a Leader – I’d not heard this phrase before, but there’s something in it. Really challenging and stresses the need for spiritual formation, particularly in a social media age.

3) Dwell Richly course – This 5 session course looks like a brilliant free resource. It’s designed to equip local church music teams to lead others in singing the gospel, from the team at Music Ministry UK.

4) Preaching: Making it Personal – I’m enjoying this punchy series on preaching from Ray Evans. This is a simple tip about how we choose to phrase our ‘points’ in preaching, but it can have a big impact in how our preaching is heard.

5) Michael Green (1930-2019) – I never had the privilege of meeting Michael Green, but his great influence as a person and evangelist has been evident in the many and varied tributes that have emerged since his death on Wednesday. Here are a couple of more notable ones: from his friend J John, and from Michael Ots, who more recently worked with him on various ‘mission weeks’.

6) Digital Devotions? – Helpful interview with Andy Geers, the founder of PrayerMate, a hugely popular app that aims to help and support you in your prayer life.

7) The Man Who Wrote Most of Wikipedia – Named amongst TIME magazine’s most influential people on the internet, this is a fun little interview with someone you’ve probably never heard of, Steven Pruitt.

Sharing is caring. Know someone who might find these links interesting? Why not forward it on?

Since January our church family has been spending time in the New Testament book of Titus. I think this little gem has been really good for us in our context – and so helpful for me personally. Here’s five reasons why…

1. The goal of planting is godliness.

Of course, on one level the ultimate goal of anything is God being glorified – but you can emphasise that in such a way that it ends up meaning nothing. In Titus, the apostle Paul’s goal seems to be ‘godliness’. He begins by explaining his own apostolic role as “furthering the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness” (Titus 1:1). In other words, he proclaims the apostolic gospel – the promise of the hope of eternal life – and he fully expects that it will lead to changed lives, i.e. people reflecting the revealed moral character of God: “self-controlled, upright and godly” (2:12). When you’re planting a new church, the pressure can be to think your aims are to establish a meeting, or put yourself on the regional map, or make a name for yourself in the community. But having godliness as the ultimate goal puts these aims in perspective. Of course, this will look messy and will feel uncomfortable. We inevitably resist changing and our churches will feel like construction sites. But lives that are taking on board God’s truth and are being changed into his likeness bring God glory.

2. Leaders/planters/elders must be being changed by God’s truth themselves.

Basically this is the first point, but pushed home for me as a pastor-teacher, which is the expectation Paul lays out in Titus 1:5-15. And that’s a wake-up call. God’s goal for me is to be changed, transformed, sanctified. Again, it’s so easy for my ‘to do’ list to be getting meetings in the diary, preparing teaching, working on the website. But more important than all of that is my own holiness. I remember reading Bonar’s famous little biography of the Scottish minister Robert Murray M’Cheyne (1813-1843), who himself nails this with his famous line: “My people’s greatest need is my own personal holiness.” Maybe we first read that and can think it almost egotistical. Isn’t this to fall into the trap of thinking God can’t do stuff without me? Well, of course he can do stuff without us. But that’s not actually the danger here. After all, that’s not the opposite of me growing in godliness. The opposite of me growing in godliness is me “claiming to know God, but by my actions denying him” (2:15). That was the disastrous situation in the churches in Crete into which Titus was given his mission. And so Titus was to be an example of everything that Paul expected in the church community, in order that – unlike the church as it had been prior to the letter – those who opposed Titus would ultimately be ashamed as they had nothing bad to say about him (2:6-8).

3. Keep the gospel on repeat.

I’ve written before about how it’s been so helpful to think of these past three and a half years as ‘planting the gospel’, rather than planting a church. I think Titus underlines this. It’s the truth that leads to godliness, and this truth is articulated in Titus as the message of God’s grace and kindness, shown in the first appearing of Jesus Christ (2:11-14; 3:4-7). So the gospel isn’t simply a message we hear when we first put our trust in Christ. As Tim Keller has said, it’s not just the ABC of the Christian faith, it’s the A to Z. Why? Because it’s this message of grace that trains us to live the godly lives that are so important in Titus (2:12). And so we must keep the gospel on repeat. That’s what Paul is getting at when he tells Titus to ‘stress these things’ (3:8; 2:15), and conversely why not getting distracted by ‘foolish controversies’ is so important. Keep the main thing the main thing. And I’ve found it particularly challenging to see that holding fast to the gospel is actually part of the list of moral qualities needed in a church leader. Maybe we scan through the list in 1:6-9 and think that the first three verses are about morality and the last is a competency issue. But it makes far more sense that the requirement to “hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught, so that [the leader] can encourage others by sound doctrine and refute those who oppose it” is just as much about integrity and godliness as everything else in the list. Which in turn underlines that there will be a temptation to shirk from it. So keep the gospel on repeat.

4. It doesn’t have to be either/or when it comes to ‘blessing the community’ vs ‘gospel proclamation’.

Whilst godliness is obviously at the heart of the apostle Paul’s aims for the church in Crete, there is another goal in mind too. Paul repeatedly stresses that godly lives will make the “teaching about God our Saviour attractive” (2:10), an idea reworded earlier (2:5,8). Like a beautiful wedding dress adorning the splendour of the bride, so our lives adorn the message we believe. The ultimate focus is not on the dress, but the bride. In other words, our godly lives show off the gospel. One of the key adjectives to describe these lives of godliness in Titus is doing or loving ‘good’ (1:8; 2:3,7,14; 3:1,8,14). Godliness is not some pious, inwardly-focused posture that turns its back on the community around us. No, it’s a generous pouring out of goodness as we realise afresh how the Fountain of Goodness has poured out his triune kindness upon us. And if it’s keeping the gospel on repeat that transforms us, then more gospelling should lead to more communal goodness. I heard one preacher put it like this, “social action is personal godliness worked out in society”.

5. Our ordinary lives and the different situations into which we find ourselves are intrinsic to the mission, not an obstacle working against it.

To put it another way, godliness is always done in context. Paul especially unpacks how the different seasons of life we’re in mean will mean we all have different and crucial parts to play (2:1-8). And that means that your age and stage of life is no barrier to God’s plan for gospel growth. Likewise, as employees (2:9-10) and citizens (3:1-2) we are called to live in a way that accords with ‘sound doctrine’, trusting that as we do so, we present a way of life that is compelling – and in turns points people back to the gospel. Perhaps sometimes we can think of our workplaces as an obstacle to God’s mission – as if what is really useful is what we do at church or amongst Christians. Likewise, perhaps the relationships and families we’ve been placed in can seem a different sphere to where God is at work. But this is to miss out on the wonder that God uses the way we go about our ordinary lives to showcase a gospel that has redeemed and set apart a people eager to do good (2:14).

What about you? Have you spent time in Titus recently? What things hit home for you?

The other week I was licensed by the Bishop of Carlisle into a ‘permanent’ ministry role here in Barrow, based at Grace Church Barrow, as opposed to the temporary nature of being a ‘curate’.

To mark the occasion, we also wanted the service to act as ‘marker’ for Grace Church; an opportunity to give thanks to God for the way He has been at work amongst us, and to formally be ‘commissioned’ as a church community, especially given the presence of representatives from some of the churches that have prayed, supported and encouraged us since ‘Grace Church 1.0’ first began in October 2017. In the Church of England, whilst there’s a suggested liturgy for when a new minister is licensed, there wasn’t anything to use to commission Grace Church. This gave us the opportunity to craft a short and simple set of words to ‘send us on our way’. It also gave us a way of allowing us to express our commitment to each other and the church’s vision.

We’d just started a series in Titus, and so we allowed some of Paul’s words to Titus to feed into the words we used. For what it’s worth, I thought I’d share them, as below.

(It may be worth saying that the service included other formal aspects, adapting our Diocese’s licensing service template, but these aspects were the ‘bits’ that most related to the commissioning, rather than my own legal licensing.)

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The Call to Ministry

Representatives of the new church gather around the new minister to present symbols of ministry.
Presenting a Bible, one says:

X, be among us as one who studies the Scriptures, proclaims the Word and encourages us with sound doctrine.
With God’s help, I will.

Presenting Water for Baptism, one says

X, be among as one who rejoices in bringing new Christians to Baptism and to share with them the Living Water, Jesus Christ himself.
With God’s help, I will.

Presenting a book of prayers, one says

X, be among us as a man of prayer,
dependent on God in all things and praying for God’s people and the Lord’s work.
With God’s help, I will.

Presenting Bread and Wine, one says

X, be among us as one who boasts in Christ and him crucified,
 leading us as we remember the Lord’s death and resurrection.
With God’s help, I will.

The new minister places each of the symbols on a table. When all the symbols have been given, the new minister responds

I pledge myself to care for the community that gathers here, to share with them the Word of God and the work of ministry, to celebrate with them the sacraments of the new covenant, and to encourage them in their discipleship. Together may we continue to experience this place and community as one where Christian people are equipped for their life and witness in God’s world and where through trust in Christ, people become heirs of the hope of eternal life.
All: Amen.

Commissioning of Grace Church

Members of Grace Church are invited by the Bishop to stand, as they are commissioned to continue serving and proclaiming Christ:

In the beginning, God spoke into darkness and there was light.
God continues to bring life and light through his powerful word. One sows, and another waters, but it is God who brings the growth. We rejoice in all that God has being doing, in and amongst you as Grace Church.

Will you love your neighbours and serve your communities, being eager to do what is good?
With the help of God we will.

Will you see all of life as opportunities to worship God; in the workplace and at home; at the school-gate and at school; with those you love and those you struggle to love?
With the help of God we will.

Will you seek to be ‘good news people’, sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with compassion and conviction, always prepared to give a reason for the hope that is in you?
With the help of God we will.

We recognise the ways the gospel is bearing fruit amongst you. Jesus calls us to go into all the world, to be his disciples and make new disciples of Christ. As you continue to be a community on mission for Christ, we commit to praying for and supporting you.
Together, by God’s grace,
We will be Christ’s people at work in the world.