Author: Danny Webster

A biblical framework for understanding politics – part 3

Danny Webster 3 Comments

Government in the New Testament

In the first two posts in this series I set out firstly the concept of political authority in theological terms, and then in yesterday’s post what this meant for how we should view government: as both legitimate but limited. I’ve also briefly touched already on the position of government and political authority in New Testament teaching, but here I want to delve a bit deeper. In particular I want to explore what impact a full understanding of the Lordship of Christ has on our engagement in politics.

Tom Wright has written extensively on this subject and a theme he returns to time and again is that Christianity has underplayed the political purpose in Christian thought, and as a result misread key aspects of the gospels and epistles.

This revolves around an incomplete understanding of what Jesus achieved through his death and resurrection.

If we understand Jesus as Lord, and subsequently understand that Caesar, or what ever contemporary ruler has taken his place in different times and contexts throughout history, are not Lord, we are free to step back and take a broader view of what Lordship means.

We’ve already referenced Jesus before Pilate, and his declaration that whatever political authority he exercised had been given to him.

 

You see, Israel wanted a liberator. They wanted a saviour who would vanquish their foes, free them from oppression and enforce the laws that were ignored.

But the coming king did not look like that.

Jesus did not ride into Jerusalem with chariots to overthrow the Roman oppressors. The Messiah who for hundreds of years they had awaited did not back the Pharisees and insist that the law, in all its detailed regulations governing every aspect of daily life, was strictly enforced. This king did not even remove himself from the enemy occupiers to create a kingdom on earth without blemish.

For Jesus those who broke the rules and those who enforced the rules were both equally wrong.

He confounded his critics and he confused his supporters.

The way that Jesus engaged in public life was completely different to anything they expected.

So when Jesus came before Pilate we see very clearly the meeting of two different kingdoms, the kingdom of the Roman Empire and the political authority that it exercised. And the Kingdom of God fully represented in the person of Jesus.

The point that Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world does not mean that it is instead an entirely spiritual one.

No, Jesus’ kingdom is not derived from this world, but it is designed for this world.

Tom Wright puts it like this: “Precisely because it is the kingdom of the wise creator God who longs to heal this world, whose justice is aimed at restoration rather than punitive destruction, it can neither be advanced nor attained by the domineering, bullying fighting kingdom methods employed in merely earthly kingdoms”.

This is how Jesus redefines what Lordship means.

Yet at exactly this point he also declares support for the existence of earthly rulers. In affirming that Pilate does have authority he is advocating government over anarchy.

The worst form of government is not dictatorship but no government at all. I’d suggest that even the very worst ruler is better than a world where we are all our own tyrants and the weak are crushed in our desire to achieve the best for ourselves that we can.

God did not send his son to destroy the world but to rescue it from evil. And the structures of human society are part of the good of creation that he came to redeem.

During Jesus’ ministry the disciples squabbled over who would get to sit on his left and his right, and Jesus sees all this as an adventure in missing the point.

He radically restates that the rules of this earth lord it over their subjects but under his kingdom the greatest must be the servant. Mark 10.45 offer the conclusion to this dramatic reversal: “The son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”.

This is more than just a statement about the work of Jesus on the cross.

It is a radically counter imperial statement. To quote Tom Wright once again: “it is an invitation to understand the atonement itself … as involving God’s victory not so much over the world and its powers but over the worldly ways of power.”

Romans 8 gives us a fuller picture of our hope for a new creation. It upstage the hope of Rome that is entering a new stage of its fruitfulness. It goes beyond our wildest dreams as to what a new creation could look like.

And this links back to what we’ve already considered: the ultimate recourse of an earthly authority is to take away life.

Jesus’ victory over death, and the promise of a future resurrection, makes this exercise of power somewhat futile. Death has, after all, been defeated.

The Lordship of Christ needs to be considered alongside the biblical themes of creation and judgement. Together, in harmony, they show us the good news. That the God who made the world now rules the world through his son Jesus.

In the closing section of Romans, 15.12, Paul echoes Isaiah 11 saying “Jesus is the one who rises to rule over the nations, and in him the nations shall hope”.

This Lordship is not just over heaven, it is not just for the ultimate future when everything will be restored to Him. It is also for the present time, for this penultimate future where we catch a glimpse of God’s coming kingdom.

And in response we are called to be the bringers of hope. The carriers of healing to a broken world. And show that Christ’s rule is good news for all.

Read on: the fourth and final part in the series

A biblical framework for understanding politics – part 2

StandardDanny Webster 3 Comments

In yesterday’s post I began to set out a framework for understanding and engaging with politics. I started out with a high level approach and showed that political authority has three key characteristics. It is created as good, it is fallen, and it has the potential for redemption.

Next, let’s have a look at government in particular, and I want to suggest that the key way of understanding it is to view it as both legitimate and it is limited. First let’s take a look at why it is legitimate.

The nature of government

government is legitimate

We’ve already considered that political authority is a concept put in place by God, but government is the outworking of that political authority.

The writers of the Old Testament point to a God that was the creator of the heavens and the earth and as such held authority over all things. Psalm 82 tells us that He is supreme over all nations and their gods.

A number of times in the Old Testament God humbles the created gods that are put up to oppose him. This happens with the prophet Baal when the Ark of the Covenant is placed in the same tent and again for King Nebuchadnezzar, where in Daniel 4.34 he was forced to admit that God’s dominion rules forever.

The psalmist recognised that the coming Messiah, the offspring of King David would exercise God’s universal rule over all nations through one person. (Ps 2.4-6)

If we move into the New Testament we see the same picture reflected. The apostles saw Jesus as having complete authority and his rule placed him as a threat to the worldly rule of Caesar. (Acts 17.7)

In 1 Peter 2.13-17 and in Romans 13.1-7 government is shown as legitimate and established by God, and as a result we should submit to it.

What’s interesting is that in both 1 Peter and in Romans the preceding sections could cast doubt on our submission to political authorities but the writers let this tension linger. Despite the challenges and potential problems, government is shown as legitimate.

The role of government is cast in broad terms: it is for commending the right and punishing the wrong.

Julian Rivers addresses this: “Anyone who fulfils the task of government has a divine mandate for that task. At some point presumably a claim of authority loses its legitimacy but that point is not identified.

Throughout scripture, in both the Old and the New Testament we see that human government is legitimate.

government is subject to the law and held to account

Governments are legitimate because they are accountable to God.

In the fourth century when Emperor Constantine was declared God’s representative on earth Gregory of Nazianzus insisted that precisely because Christians understand God to be Trinity, no human ruler can ever reflect God adequately.

And it has been a central claim of political theology down the ages that Kings remain answerable to God for their actions.

This conviction runs counter to the regular proclamation that ‘God is on our side’, whatever side that might be.

A core biblical theme is that each individual is accountable to God for the actions they take while on earth, and that has to include our political activity. (Matt 25.31-46)

As well as being accountable to God an important practical outworking of legitimate government is a human structure of accountability which gives space for critique from those who have some distance from the immediate decision making. But we’ll come onto that in a little while.

government is limited

The mandate for government is to commend the right and to punish the wrong. Both simple sounding and asking an awful lot.

We have perhaps got rather used to a picture of limited government, and in particular in non-conformist church circles, to not view the role of government as promoting true religion.

But in scripture we see a holistic picture that calls people away from a life that is focused on the self and towards reconciliation with the one true God.

We also are given a picture of new creation where there will be no more death or mourning, where everything will be made new.

So it’s not immediately obvious that the role of Christians, whether in politics, the judiciary, the public sector, or anywhere else, is not to give themselves fully to the work of building God’s kingdom and trying to achieve this through the institutions of government. It is not immediately clear what limits there are to the potential for government in meeting this goal.

However, government is necessarily limited because of the methods that are at its disposal. The final recourse of a human authority is the taking of life, and this sits awkwardly with a King who rejected the way of the sword.

It is also limited because you cannot coerce people into doing something. At the end of the day, you can take away liberty, you can confiscate property, but if you only ever end up taking life to enforce your rule you lack the legitimacy that comes with consent to be governed.

This does not mean that government is rendered useless, but it does provide a cautionary tale in case we start to think that government can do all that we might want it to do.

There’s a further limitation, and that comes from an understanding of the law, the law given to Israel.

We see particularly clearly in Paul’s writings that there are limits to the law. It can show people how far short they fall from God’s perfect plan, but the law clearly failed to make Israel righteous and we too should be careful that we don’t invest too much faith in a system that is after all a human construct.

And as we mentioned earlier, government is subject to the same affect of our fallen nature that our own inability to be righteous on our own so clearly demonstrates.

government should be diffuse

A further limitation on government is that power should be diffuse, and by this I mean that it should be spread out rather than concentrated in one place or person.

This works itself out in two ways. Firstly political rule is not the only form of authority that we live with. There are other institutions that the Bible clearly values and it is essential that we understand the roles that the family and the church play, as well as our own freedom to self-govern, when we consider what we want the state to do.

The church exercises authority, and the authority that it exercises comes from God and not from political authorities.

This cracks open the idea that political government is the only source of authority. The family is a further structure that is given a crucial role in ensuring order and peace. In the marriage union we find another foundational social unit.

The second way that this works out is that political authority is not just not the only form of authority, but within that authority the operation of power should be diffuse.

While there is no mandate for a particular form of government under the new covenant we are told that we should live as salt and light among all people.

We can learn from the practice of Israel. God put structures in place through tribes and priests, he gave them judges, he provided them with a king when they wanted to be like other countries. He sent prophets to call the kings back to account.

The Kings which Israel so desperately desired were joined by prophets who held them to account. Power was not given to a single person, and no particular model worked better than the former.

Even the very best of people, on their way to full and final redemption through Christ are still broken and inclined to act in a way that serves themselves and not the good of all.

So political authority is created good, it is fallen and it has the potential for redemption.

We should also acknowledge that while there is clearly a legitimate role for government this role should be limited, and it should be diffuse rather than concentrated in one particular place or person.

Read on: Part 3 – Government in the New Testament

A biblical framework for understanding politics – part 1

Danny Webster 5 Comments

Introduction

Welcome to this mini series of posts which more or less mirror a talk I gave at the Salvation Army’s training college this week. There’ll be four posts in all but even spread across this many words and posts it is a fairly fast tour through the biblical themes. Hopefully, it will help provide a better understanding political authority, and what this should look like when worked out in the institutions of government. Alternatively you can download the whole series as a PDF.

Each of the posts offer a further layer to help us understand what the Bible has to teach us, so today we stay on quite a conceptual level, but hopefully by the end a picture full of texture and colour will have been built up. I also hope it will be clear why I consider politics as something essential for Christians to engage with. As this comes from a talk I apologise that the quotes aren’t properly referenced, most of them come from God and Government edited by Nick Spencer and Jonathan Chaplin, but others I’ve dug out from a variety of other sources. However, I’d suggest you don’t read that book because then you’d realise just how significantly it has influenced the development of these posts. (that was a joke. it’s a fantastic book which I’d very strongly recommend, and I’ll freely admit most of this comes from it)

In this first post I’ll look at political authority in general and pull out three aspects of that authority which we can draw from the Bible.

In subsequent posts I’ll consider how we should view the idea of government more specifically, and then a reasonable amount of time will be given to assessing the Lordship of Christ and what this can teach us about the exercise of political authority.

In the final post I’ll touch on a few of the main purposes of government and how these are affected by our understanding of the bible.

Nature of political authority:

powers as created

So to start, let’s take a look at the nature of political authority.

In the beginning God created the world. We understand creation as the divine work of calling all things into being.

And in Genesis while we see that the earth is created by God we also see humans given a role of authority – they are co-creators.

It’s not just a one off command, a one time only opportunity; Adam and Eve were asked to name all the animals. They were told to go forth and multiply and to have dominion over every living thing that moves on earth.

This command is not just about biological reproduction, it is also about the work of governing, directing and developing culture. Nigel Wright states that “The building of societies, nations and cultures is thus understood as part of human responsibilities before God, part of what we are called to do”.

Government as an institution, or even the organisation of basic communities, would not exist outside of the human beings that comprise them. There is no franchise model that we buy into, government is not a pre-ordained, off the shelf, divine institution that we partake in. It is what we create.

The outworking of governance, and the form that it takes, is a product of our ingenuity and our God given creativity. It is what we do in our role as co-creators with God.

The political authority we recognise as government is what enables us to achieve goals that would be out of reach on our own. It is the way that we come together to build a social structure that works for the good of all.

So my first point is this: political authority is a divine creation in its origin but human in its prescription and its outworking.

powers as fallen

If we stopped there we’d have a rather one sided view of political authority. Because it all sounds rather rosy, but it bears very little resemblance to the exercise of political authority we see around us.

Let’s take a whirlwind tour through the outworking of political authority in the Bible because it doesn’t always paint a picture of political authority as good. Representative democracy was not on the scene but there is still a good spread of different regimes.

We have Pharaoh and the Egyptians and their oppressive regime, we have the Babylonian and Assyrian Empires and the brutality that went with their conquest.

In the New Testament we see the Roman Empire in all its glory, bringing order to the known world but at the cost of human dignity.

In both Daniel and Revelation the empires of this world are described as a ravaging beast (Dan 2.31-45, 7.1-8; Rev 13).

If the institutions of political authority grow out of our human nature, then not only will they reflect the good that is in us, placed there at creation, but also the fallen and sinful nature to which we turned.

We should not be surprised that the exercise of political authority will be as corrupt as our own nature is.

Too often governments are simply an expression of domination, as Walter Wink says, wielding power through violent means over the majority for the sake of the elite.

It’s taken a long time for political authority to move from serving those elites to acting in a way that is in the interests of the whole country. And we’re not there yet.

Power isn’t given up easily, even in our present democratic state we have to ask whether the exercise of political authority is done in a way that reflects our created state or our fallen nature.

We see that political authority is an ambiguous power. It is God given and it is honourable, it is an outworking of the cultural mandate we have been given.

But it is also used for the pursuit of self, and for the oppression of others. And we have seen this far too frequently throughout history.

powers as ‘to be’ redeemed

This is not the end of the story, Nigel Wright comments, “Fallenness is not the last word about anything or anybody”.

If the institutions of political authority reflect ourselves as created in the image of God, and marred by our fallen nature, then they too can be redeemed.

Where once they worked to serve our ambitions and schemes, they can be turned to serve others and honour God. They can shift to fulfil the life enhancing role that God had in mind at their creation.

But the redemption is only ever partial in the here and now.

We live in a space where the Kingdom of God has begun to break in. But we see only a glimpse of its true glory. In the same way political authority will only be fully redeemed in the fullness of time.

This means we cannot hold too great a hope for the redemption of political authorities.

Yet it is a hope. It is a hope that the power of the state can be used to enhance life, promote justices and secure peace and prosperity for all.

When the exercise of political authority moves towards the work of justice it is both a reflection of the good in its original creation and itself a witness to the activity of redemption that is at work.

Therefore: government is an ambiguous concept

I’ve very briefly outlined three aspects of political authority, but they don’t operate separately, or consecutively. It is not that any particular political authority is good, fallen, or only on its way to redemption.

Instead the three aspects are threads that intertwine and exist simultaneously in all political authority.

Overall, this view of political authority as created, fallen and on its way towards redemption shows us that government is an ambiguous concept.

It’s not to say that all examples of political authority are equal, at different times and in different places the redemptive possibilities may be nearly invisible as humans in their fallen state exercise authority with all the selfishness they can muster.

Likewise, we should not focus too much on any one of the three perspectives, if we consider only the original good that we are created with we can be naïve as to the potential dangers.

And too much focus on the fallen dismisses the potential for good and we can become paranoid about the exercise of authority.

If we forget about that redemption is only partial we can be overly optimistic about what will come next.

The three threads need to be held in tension.

And this ambiguous picture of political authority is reflected in the biblical ambivalence towards its outworking.

We’ll look at the nature of government in the New Testament in a future post but it is worth noting Jesus’ words to Pilate at this point. In John’s gospel when facing trial before Pilate Jesus says: “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.” (John 19.11)

There are limitations on earthly political authority, there are things it can do, but it cannot act alone, and it cannot act without recourse to a greater source of authority.

Julian Rivers assesses government as “a natural product of human society made much harder by sin; a good gift, like marriage, and like marriage, easily distorted and subverted”.

And I think this is a picture we would recognise. The modern state has achieved huge strides in promoting human welfare but it has not been without abuse.

In tomorrow’s post we’ll probe a little deeper into the nature and role of government as the outworking of political authority to understand this tension further.

Light, darkness and the ballot box

StandardDanny Webster 1 Comment

Today is polling day. I voted at a few minutes after 7 and I wasn’t the first: a couple of people trudged through the room in the local Methodist church ahead of me. Outside in the rain stood a Lib Dem teller with her clipboard, she didn’t ask for my poll card number as I lifted my hood as a shield to the elements. I hadn’t been canvassed by the Lib Dems so I’m not sure what good my information would have done on the telling tallies.

I voted because I think voting matters. I voted because I care about who runs my city as I care who runs the country. I voted because as a Christian I believe that we should take responsibility for the world around us and that means making difficult choices about what needs to be done. Last night I wrote in haste about the place of Christian political parties. If you read that it will not surprise you that as my pencil lingered for a moment above the paper awaiting my crosses it was not drawn towards the Christian People’s Alliance.

But my vote was not an automatic one. For I had not been impressed with any of the campaigns in London. Added to this, the dynamic of a supplementary vote system was new to me, voting for one of the top two candidates with your first vote renders your second pointless, so I was tempted to give my first choice to a candidates that wouldn’t normally attract my support. Peter Ould has written this morning that social conservatives should withhold their vote from the Conservative Party to send a message that they won’t be taken for granted.

What I picked up from his post was that we’re too easily taken for a ride. We hear the politicians fawning over every target group, offering special targeted messages and focus group tested policies. We hear the Bible verses quoted and the laudable things said about how integral Christians are to society. And then we are surprised when the politicians turn the other way once in office.

If our political engagement is only about extracting a promise from candidates and political parties at election time then we are asking to be used and abused. It is almost as though we want politicians to promise us the earth. If politicians only make promises as a factor in electoral calculations they will be willing to ditch them if the algebra changes.

So the answer is to vote for the party that mostly closely reflects your values, and then see how you can get involved to influence those values and the policies that arise from them. My fear for politics is that too often the value that overrules the others is the desire to get elected and whim and whimsy too often come to the fore. But like all areas of life where problems exist, they will not be solved by staying on the sidelines and becoming experts at what’s wrong.

I think for some people who usually vote Conservative, now might be a good time to send a signal that you won’t be taken for granted. But don’t just do that through the ballot box, don’t abstain because that is abdicating responsibility, and don’t vote for a party you like even less because that’s just spiteful.

If politics is a place too shrouded in darkness then we have to be the ones who will bring the light.

Why I don’t think Christian political parties are the best option

StandardDanny Webster 19 Comments

This week the God and Politics blog ran an interview with Malcolm Martin, the lead candidate for the London Assembly elections for the Christian People’s Alliance. At the time I was inclined to respond but decided against it as I didn’t want to get drawn into a political debate, and I didn’t want to be seen as casting judgement on another Christian engaging in politics – something I am passionate to see more of. Then this evening came a bit of a discussion (not really a spat as I originally wrote) on twitter about the relative validity of the Christian People’s Alliance and whether Christians should vote for them.

So being unable to express in 140 characters some nuanced thoughts, here comes a quick fire summary of why I don’t think that Christian parties are the best way for Christians to engage in politics.

Firstly, a caveat, I think people should vote for who they support and would like to see in government. That means that for some people the candidates running under a Christian ticket may well be the best candidate for them. Gillan Scott, who’s set up and quickly established the God and Politics blog as a go to destination, has taken a bit of flack for running the interview, which is perhaps a little unfair, I think like everyone the Christian People’s Alliance have a voice that deserves to be heard. Occasionally I speak to churches about political engagement, almost invariably I will be asked a question about whether Christians should vote for Christian political parties, this is more or less what I say.

Summary

I do not believe that there should be any suggestion that for Christians the best party to support is the party with Christian in the name.

And this is why:

  1. Pragmatic.

The two Christian parties that operate in the UK, the Christians People’s Alliance and the Christian Party are both very small in terms of the votes they garner and the seats in which they stand. This means that it is highly unlikely that they will be in a position to win seats, and even were they to, to influence political decisions.

  1. Political

This should not, in and of itself, be a reason not to vote for a party, often key voices come from the margin, and people not in the centre of decision making are able to take a view counter to the political mainstream. However, politics is about programmes and about delivering on these programmes. Therefore there needs to be an ability to do more than protests about problems with the current system. Fringe political parties, and by their electoral results the CPA and CP can both fairly be defined as such, are little more than pressure groups, and when I cast a vote I am voting for someone to govern not for someone to issue press releases.

  1. Philosophical

There are two Christian political parties. This should be enough to demonstrate that Christians don’t agree on political issues, the CPA are more centrist and the CP are more right wing. All of the political parties contain things in their platform that I disagree with. If I wanted a party where I agreed with everything it would have a membership of one: me. If we are to engage in the political process then we have to accept that disagreeing with things that a political party says is not a barrier to engagement. And if we want to see political parties stand for things that are closer to what we believe, then it is more vital than ever that we engage in them and advocate for those policies we wish to see.

  1. Theological

I wanted to find another ‘p’ to say this but my brain was struggling. This is the reason why in the end I don’t think that Christian political parties are the best choice for Christians, that’s over and above the other reasons outlined above, which in the right circumstances could all be ameliorated.

The idea and operation of Christian parties promotes an approach that verges on theocracy. It suggests that as Christians we will rule the country in a Christian way, and in a way that only Christians can. I am aware that those involved in the parties mentioned would dispute this.

But we live in a country where many people are not Christian, and to govern through parties that are identified as Christian with an explicitly Christian programme would suggest that we are seeking to introduce a political programme that is actually the enforcement of religious belief.

I don’t think that Christians have all the answers. I think that in the end, God’s Kingdom will come, and in the meantime God works through us to bring that Kingdom into our world a little bit at a time. But there are good ideas and aspects of that greater good that comes from sources outside the church. It is important that we recognise this. Politics is about making things work, for Christians it is about accepting that while overall authority lies with God he gives us a mandate to act on that authority.

The gospel is also about freedom, it is the thing that brings true freedom and it sustains freedom. The gospel is about the choice to follow God, and any attempt to legislate for religious belief, or even to try and enforce morality through the legal system will not only engender hostility towards Christianity, it is simply not the way that the gospel works.

Conclusion

In summary, Christians, like all people should vote how they wish, and in the Mayoral elections that may mean voting for the Christian People’s Alliance, but as someone passionately committed to seeing more Christians engaging in politics, and making a difference in the political sphere, it is not the route that I would advocate. I would suggest joining one of the mainstream parties, which ever one comes closest to you views. I would suggest getting involved, putting in the hard work, and seeing how, we can not only speak what we believe, but live it and see others changed by how we live and what we support. For more information I’d recommend the Christians in Politics website.

My love/hate relationship with social media

Danny Webster 1 Comment

At the end of church, after meetings, when I surface from the tube, the first thing I do is check my phone. Sometimes I’ve felt it buzzing away while I’ve sat politely ignoring it’s vibrating clarion call, but even if I haven’t, I might have missed it so I check anyway. And those times I exile myself from communication for minutes or even hours, I fervently check as soon as I can. I don’t want to be out of the loop.

Plenty of the communicative stimuli are not even directed at me. I graze through twitter browsing the frequently inane or irrelevant things others have to say. And those I do care about only occasionally have any true connection to the rest of my life.

I am at the same time connected to everyone but connecting with no one.

There’s a growing commentariat on the affect of new media on our lives: how we spend our time together huddled over our individual phones, ignoring the people we are supposedly with.

There are the critics, highlighted this week through a column in the New York Times, and then followed up in the Guardian, who make the case that the advent and avalanche of communication is making us more lonely and less able to converse.

And then there are the passionate defenders of the cause, who emphasise the social of social media. Just because it is different does not mean it is bad. It is just a new form of communicating, the telephone was not the death knell of social interaction and neither will twitter. In fact, they would argue, because of it’s scale it enables community that is not restricted by physical location.

For me, I’m stuck in the middle. I love the information that social media, particularly twitter, feed to me through a personally audited set of sources. And the fact I connect with people I otherwise wouldn’t is a bonus. But it’s not community.

The ideas behind this post would never have surfaced without social media, I first saw Simon Jenkin’s Guardian piece on twitter, then the New York Times one on facebook, and then a tweet sent my mind into overdrive. Vicky Beeching, worship leader and twitter supremo, had thrown out a couple of questions to her legion of followers (20,000 or so), and then summed it up with “Thanks for all the advice on cameras & on your favourite WordPress themes…I love the way this community works! #HoorayForSocialMedia”. (Caveat: I think Vicky Beeching is great, her tweet just got me thinking, and I guess having a big following poses many challenges of its own.)

First reaction: if I had 20,000 followers I’d get pretty good feedback to questions I asked. It’s not social media winning here, it’s celebrity.

Second reaction: this isn’t community, it’s a bunch of people who for short moments of time alight on topics of shared interest.

Third reaction: if I had 20,000 followers I’d have to put in a tonne of effort to maintain engagement with them.

If I assess my use of social media as a source of media then I judge it with one set of criteria, and if I see it as a social forum I use another. They come out with two quite different results.

And that got me thinking even deeper. Maybe I do social media wrong, maybe if I’m to really get the social part of it I need to engage more with it, talk to people more, respond more, build connections, give and not just take. But really, as much as I enjoy the eclectic range of conversations that I can become absorbed in, the question I am reaching to bring to some sort of conclusion, is: to what end am I working? Am I deepening relationships or avoiding them?

I hear stories of people striking up conversation with someone, asking about some aspect of their life they recall from prior interaction only to realise they have never spoken before and the information has only been gleaned through loitering on their facebook page.

I said that the telephone has not killed social interaction. But I don’t really like the telephone. I use it, and I think it is hugely useful, but if I never had to have another telephone call I wouldn’t be upset. And having proper conversations on the phone in public just seems odd to me, I’ll sit down with a cup of tea on the sofa if I’ve got to maintain contact with those I otherwise would not see.

Before I go searching out more relationships I want to prioritise those that I am already engaged in. I will always opt for time spent with people, because time matters. It gives the room for silence, the space for posture to convey meaning, the scope for openness and vulnerability. When you spend time with people it’s not just the things that you say that matter, it is your presence. It is the fact that you cared enough to trail through the rain to see them. It’s not just the bottle of wine you share but the words that flow from stoic compassion. In the immediacy of twitter a moment is all you have. The movement of interactions that form a relationship are lost among myriad competing claims.

For me at least, social media is about me. I’m in it for the information it will give me. I’m in it for the followers and the retweets. The flattening of access that benefits those of us on the ground floor. And that means I’ve got to be very cautious about how I use it. I have to censor myself to prevent the nefarious elements coming to the fore.

But hey, as we so often fall back to, we’re all different: what’s a challenge for me does not mean it is a challenge for you.

And maybe that is true. Yet too often it is a convenient excuse to avoid having to address hard truths. I think it’s the contemporary introvert/extrovert debate. If you’re an introvert that doesn’t give you an excuse from avoiding making new friends. And if you’re an extrovert that’s not a reason to avoid finding depth with a few people. We’re all different, but the challenges we face are frequently the same.

How do we balance the growth of community, in any form – online or in person, with ensuring that we’re going deeper?

I want to go home

Danny Webster 1 Comment

This post is a bit of a follow up to one from a couple of weeks ago, Community for introverts, it might help to read that first.

We all need to find a place called home.

Dorothy wanted to go there, football fans know the power of home. I grew up in a home and now I’m not sure if it is still my home.

All sorts of things can be said about home, whether it is a place, or a group of people, or a state of mind.

All sorts of things can be done in an attempt to get home. Maybe it is the goal that overrides all others, maybe it is the comfort, the solace, the refuge that quietens our soul in times of need.

Maybe it is the sound of familiar voices, the feel of well worn furniture, the love from those you love.

But what if those things are absent? When you start again and the raw materials before you are not enough. When the pieces of the puzzle refuse to fit together.

I want to be home, but I don’t know where that is. Too often life is just good natured fun. We roll with the good times and do our utmost to avoid the bad ones. When sadness hits we don’t have the language, the posture, the temperament to handle the dislocation it causes. I haven’t shared enough joy to really comprehend the depth of sadness I should experience. I haven’t given enough of myself away to know the cost when someone takes that away.

Sometimes we mistake social activity for building community.

Because at first glance they can appear the same, but if we dig a little deeper social activity is based on the present, but community is prepared to sacrifice gratification in the present to build something better for the future. Community will ask the hard questions and not tolerate evasion, it will make space for silence and not be worried if the fun is sometimes suspended.

Social activity works on what is convenient, community depends on effort.

The challenge is how we build an authentic, deep, community in an environment where the immediate too often takes precedence. Because when depth is forthcoming it is often only because the future looks more constrained than before and depth suddenly becomes more urgent.

Community is the gradual unravelling of the layers that we shroud our innermost being with. It’s the place where we find the courage to bare our souls. It’s the people with whom we can share the things that hurt more than the words we muster can convey. It’s the love that doesn’t reject but a love that also corrects. We are in community when the self satisfaction of opening oneself up is not met with warm applause but with the gentle reminder that in all likelihood all that has been exposed is another layer of false presumptions and facades to deflect attention from what’s going on inside.

A place like this doesn’t happen by chance. Every now and then there will be a moment of transparency and deep surrender, maybe prompted by the knowledge that God is near, or maybe by the emotional flux we are caught in. And we throw open the flood gates and let others into our lives. But then the morning comes and we recover our composure and barricade the defences once again. We acknowledge the value of emotional openness but find ways of drifting away from the personal in case we might display our vulnerability in the cold light of day.

There are always reasons and ways to shift from the personal to the abstract, and we find them too easily. Instead of being open and vulnerable we talk about the need to be open and vulnerable. We have the lofty intentions but it somehow remains something we should do rather than a mode of living our lives.

When I write I try to strip away the theory and the ideas, and force myself not to just write in the abstract. Sometimes it doesn’t make it onto the blog. Sometimes my friends counsel me against publishing it. But more often than not it does. I have this pang of uncertainty when I publish something that exposes a little bit of my heart, a fraction of the pain I feel, an ounce of the hope that lingers above all else. I fear what others will think when they read my words.

This all links into the post a few weeks back on community for introverts, it is easier for me to broadcast emotions into the ether than sit down and talk. It is preferable, from a convenience point of view, to have fun times that don’t ask too much of me. It is hard to hang around through the interminable mingling of after church conversations, and make the effort to deepen friendships beyond what is fun.

But it is essential. Not the after church mingling, that truly is torturous. The sacrifice of convenience for community, the perils of openness to achieve depth, the hard graft of honesty so people really know who we are. The path back home.

A manifesto of what I am not

Danny Webster 1 Comment

I am not defined by what I do.

I am not defined by the job that I have, the hours I work, the contacts I build.

I am not defined by my achievements, my success, my ability to overcome.

I am not defined by the words I write, whether they are silky smooth or nuanced in their brutal truth.

I am not defined by how many people read this blog, retweet my links, or share them on facebook.

I am not defined by my facebook friends, twitter followers, likes on Instagram or repins on Pinterest.

I am not defined by my iPhone, or the 8 different ways of communicating it brings.

I am not defined by the lack of little red numbers in the corner of icons reminding me that no one has wanted to contact me in the last hour.

I am not defined by being permanently switched on.

I am not defined by my determination to make it on my own, the fallacy of individualistic sufficiency.

I am not defined by my unshakeable lack of emotions or how I throw off whatever challenges may try to push me off the ledge.

I am not defined by the pain that gnaws away inside. The things that other people do not see.

I am not defined by the people I have hurt, those I have rejected or ignored, those I have treated with disdain, those I consider as friends but refuse to live my life with.

I am not defined by the friends I do not have, those I think would make me happier and more wanted.

I am not defined by the crowd and the desire to belong.

I am not defined by my isolation, the instinct to run and hide and flee from the world.

I am not defined by filling my diary three weeks in advance. Nor the empty evenings I pretend are for relaxation.

I am not defined by busyness or lack of sleep.

I am not defined by my singleness. Nor those around me falling in love.

I am not defined by my past.

I am not defined by the wrongs that I have done. The envy and the jealousy, the lust and the greed. And all that I have done in pursuit of these maleficent ends.

I am not defined by the fear that everything might all go wrong.

I am not defined by the fear that people might think me a hopeless failure, an unmitigated disaster, a waster or a scoundrel.

I am not defined by those I please nor those I disappoint.

I am not defined by other people.

I am not defined by myself

I am not, because He is I am.

Carey, culture wars and the quest for civility

Danny Webster 4 Comments

Christians are vilified in the UK, they are subject to hounding and persecution. They are targeted by aggressive campaigners. At least this is how former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey sees things.

There’s just a small problem with this, in fact, three. Firstly it’s simply not true, Christians in the UK are not persecuted. They do not risk their lives to worship, they are not imprisoned for converting and they are not banning from preaching. And to suggest as much leads to the second problem: it minimises and trivialises the very real suffering that Christians in places such as Iran, Nigeria and North Korea experience.

Those two should be reason enough to ward Christians off from using such intemperate language. But there is a bigger and harder to define problem, talking and writing in this way ostracises Christians from the world around them. It erects barriers and it defines the relationship between church and society as one based on conflict rather than reconciliation. It fosters an ‘us versus them’ mentality, rather than attempting to build one more akin to the ‘I-thou’ spoke of by Martin Buber.

It is planting the seeds and nurturing the saplings of a culture war. And it’s not like we don’t know where this leads. It leads to law suits and protests, and ad campaigns and vitriolic journalistic exposes. Maybe we’re a lot closer to this than we thought.

The adverts planned and then banned from Christian organisations mimicking and opposing those plastered on buses across London by gay rights group Stonewall are the latest volley in this escalating environment. I doubt it was planned this way, but if they expected them to be vetoed then the whole thing is straight out of the culture war play book: do something, it gets banned, then sue for the right to do it.

I think the actions of some Christians do the credibility of Christian public witness a great deal of harm. Sometimes the retort is that Christians should be expected to be ridiculed and marginalised, and that we are called to not be ashamed of the gospel. And we will and we are. I’m just not sure that it’s always the gospel that is being paraded so publicly and unashamedly, and for which we are being ridiculed.

There will always be an element of friction between the Church and its surrounding culture. I believe that there are aspects of the world around us about which Church is to have a role in standing for truth and righteousness: a signal to how things should be and how they one day will be. And sometimes this means that the church will have controversial things to say. Sometimes these things will be completely contrary to the dominant view in society.

I don’t think it’s easy to speculate as to what Jesus might have plastered on the side of a fishing boat as it crossed the Sea of Galilee. I don’t think he’d have ran the ads proposed this week, but nor do I think he’d have run ads calling on people to feed the hungry. The thing about Jesus was that he was a man of action, he fed the hungry, he healed the sick; people followed him because his words and actions came together. He engaged them in conversation and eschewed megaphone politics.

There are two outcomes to the bus ad farce, for many people it has perpetuated the idea that Christians don’t like gay people (which should not be true). And for some Christians it has reinforced their notion that they are being discriminated against (which in the UK is rarely true). Stuff like this just doesn’t work, it exacerbates the problem.

The words and actions of Christians complaining of persecution are not representative of the church in the UK, but they are powerful. They feed into a mindset that recognises martyrdom as an affirmation of authentic belief, so when Christians are being oppressed it is a sign that we are doing something right. This means that for those purporting to stand up for Christians there is a groove already set of what this looks like in practise. And unfortunately dog whistle campaigning works.

Because while I feel better placed to critique the actions of Christians they are far from the only ones culpable of inculcating this culture war. For Christians who hold to a orthodox Christian understanding of sexuality, where sexual relationships should only take place within the context of marriage between a man and a woman, it is easy to view much of the world around them as hostile to their beliefs. While I do not consider such sexual ethics as central to the gospel, it is a part of my belief system. And I chose to live, or at least I try to live, in a way that honours God and this means that I and other Christians act in a way that is sometimes at odds with the world around them. It is becoming increasingly difficult to publicly defend and promote such views without being branded as intolerant and homophobic. So while Christians are not persecuted, there is a pressure placed on them to conform to views other than those rooted in their faith.

I do not seek to, in many cases I cannot, justify the way in which Christians have sometimes promoted and defended their views on sexuality. But I think it is vital in order to develop a society that is civil and tolerant of difference that Christians are able to say things that are unpopular.

Now whether they should do so, and certainly how they do so, is a different matter, I don’t think the kingdom of god is advanced by the proposed bus adverts. I think God sent his son to earth to bring reconciliation, the crowds wanted him at the head of a revolution, but he let himself be taken and killed for the rebellion of the rest of us. He died so the curtain could be torn, we shouldn’t be trying to brick up the hole sheered by his death.

The church needs to lead the way in finding a better way to cope with our differences. I believe there is a way and I believe in Jesus we have both the way to reconciliation and the model for that reconciliation.

The Jesus Chronicles – Long live the King | Easter Sunday

Danny Webster Leave a comment

They have stolen the body. Someone has moved it, how dare they? Don’t they know who this is? Can’t they let us come to terms with our loss, with the fact that the one that we have has gone.

The tears of grief turn to tears of anguish. Mary runs back to find the disciples, the little one heeds her call and is out the door. Peter not wanting to be left behind sets off in pursuit. They come to the tomb and Mary is right, Jesus is not there.

The pain soon turns to anger, and the anger to frustration and confusion. And just there at the end of the confusion is the faintest glimmer of hope. The scene before them doesn’t make sense, the grave clothes haven’t been ripped off by a thief, they have been walked out of.

Mary is left outside weeping at this latest desecration. She cries out. And the angels comfort her.

The gardener tries to talk to her but she is beyond herself. And then he calls her name.

Suddenly the darkness has turned to light. The night has gone and the day has come. Death has given way to life. In the morning as the tears pour down her cheeks Mary sees Jesus before her: the same only somehow different. As he spoke her name, her heart stirred out of love for the one she knew so well, as he urged her not to cling to his body, she comprehended the distance that was now between them. He was there, but he was not.

We could argue for centuries, and the theologians probably have, whether the death or the resurrection of Jesus is the more important event. And maybe it’s a pointless conversation, without death there would be no need for resurrection, but without resurrection death would be the end.

For me the joy that cometh in the morning wins. We are dead and we all need resurrection. It is the hope that Jesus, walking out of his grave clothes, brings that defines what life this side of the cross must look like. We do not have to follow Jesus onto the cross, but we do have to follow him out of the grave.

As Tom Wright notes, the resurrection is on the first day of the new week, it is the dawn of a new creation. It is the same in so many ways, but it is also so very different.

The disciples were hiding out in Jerusalem, knowing that their lives were at stake, they had publicly followed this crucified man who was killed as a king trying to lead a revolution. They locked the doors but Jesus found a way in.

The king is dead, long live the king.