Faith and Failure

We are God’s idols – Life:unmasked

StandardDanny Webster Leave a comment

You are God’s idol. Humanity is created as God’s idol.

Like a bolt out the blue, like a shock through the heart. Like the words from a page coming to life.

Like the truth that I know and the truth I deny. That God loves me and made me and created me as his image.

But more than that, that he has no need for graven statues to manifest his presence on earth. Because we are that. That is what we are as well as what we do.

When God chose to represent himself on earth we are what he created. When Jesus ascended he did so in bodily form, bearing the marks of his suffering, displaying and retaining his humanity as a sign of the resurrection that is to come.

And that means that not only does God love me. But it means that he wants me. And more than that he identifies in me.

So when I start suggesting to myself that I am really not worth very much. Or that I do not have talents which others could appreciate. Or when I tell myself, in this very parish, or to the quiet of my soul, that no one could ever choose to be with me, or to like me. What I am doing when I do these things is to take a scalpel and carve out of me something which God has placed there.

In a way that escapes the confines of my comprehension the way that I treat myself and think of myself is a choice to treat God in that same way. Perhaps echoing Matthew 25, what I do to myself, as well as I do to the least of these is a reflection of what I am doing to God.

I sit somewhat inadequate in my macbook-less state. With no international preaching ministry or book deal. I feel small beyond my size, I feel lost, sometimes beyond redemption.

But in my better, clearer, more lucid of days I know that these are not the way I should view myself. And perhaps, today, I have a better understanding of why that is.

For the first time today, and in a rather unusual manner given my presence at a theology conference, I’ve joined in with Life:unmasked started by Joy Bennett.

The stimulation for today’s thoughts have been gratefully received from Crispin Fletcher Louis at the Pioneer Summer School of Theology. Much to chew over and think about.

Living a story while losing the plot

Danny Webster 3 Comments

I hoped that one day I would write a piece of such heart achingly brilliant prose which would adroitly encapsulate my distorted emotions. I hoped it would help me see clearly through the mists of fear and doubt.

I thought I could write myself into a solution.

I thought if I wrote enough, if I wrote with enough passion. If I used clever plays on words. Wrote short sentences for effect.

Or longer ones. I thought that if I gained enough of a following, if I garnered enough affirmation for the quality of my writing and the wisdom of my words. I thought that then everything would be all right.

But I was writing about nothing. I was a phantom without a cause. I was a writer in need of a following and in search of people to tell me I was good enough.

But it’s not enough.

I sit awkwardly under compliments that I receive and frustratingly hit refresh as no one reads the posts into which I have poured the most of me. I think this is going to be one of those.

For the last two weeks I’ve realised that underneath the labels I wear I feel increasingly hollow inside. Almost as though I have been running on empty for a while but only just spluttering towards a halt.

I assess my life and wonder what it would be like to leave it all behind and walk into another scene.

To pack up my bags and do something completely different. If I were to accept that things haven’t really worked out how I thought they would.

But I never really had any hope for how things would be: I’m not even sure what those things are.

I hoped that would become clear. I hoped I would discover some overriding passion, a cause to fight for. Maybe micro-credit in southAsia, or sanitation in west Africa, or human trafficking on our doorstep. A story that I could jump into head first and would become the defining feature of my life.

Instead I flit from this to that, using skills but not passion. Bringing craft to words but not with purpose. Always dreaming that somewhere down the line I would stumble into the answer. I hid my lack of purpose with elegant prose; I obfuscated with metaphors and alliteration as my vices of choice. I even wrote about writing, the last recourse of one without a cause. 

But life is not like that, very rarely do answers fall out of the sky.

I wanted a story to tell as long as it wasn’t my own. I wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself in order to abdicate my need to address who I am. I wanted a story I could write myself out of.

I live in the hypocritical paradox of both craving approval and seeking anonymity. I cannot even move towards either of these maleficent ends with any conviction.

I am lost.

In my arrogance I think that the world needs to hear what I have to say. Whatever that might be.

In my weakness I know that no one cares.

And in between I try to find a way of living. In part it is a charade, and in part it is an act of faith. It is the grappling with what to do when I don’t know what to do. It is the search for who I am when that seems out of reach.

It is the longing of a heart that wants to do the right thing and it is the cry of despair at not knowing what that is.

It is the strength to see failure as something I must embrace, but the weakness that fears what this might look like.

And through it all I long for God to intervene, but I do not allow him to get too close; or me too close to him. I think I fear I will let him down: that whatever he asks of me will be too much and I will be too little.

I shy away from committing with everything I have because I worry about the cost of it not working out. I avoid opining about quite how frail I have become in case anyone realises just how true it is.

To strip away any pretence: I do not know what I am doing, and I do not know why I am doing whatever it is that I am doing.

But sometimes that’s okay. Sometimes that is the way things go. When mists surround and fog envelopes and doubt is all you know as true. At least it is somewhere to start. It is an authentic emotion where for so long they have felt manufactured. It is an accurate picture of where I am, and it is from where I am that I must start. 

I know this is not a place to linger, or a place where I can find solace. It is not a refuge but a launch pad. On to what, I do not know.

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.

Community for introverts

Danny Webster 2 Comments

I like to have time on my own. And sometimes that means I find church awkward, because it is built around community. The building of relationships, the time spent sharing experiences, the aura of accountability and the torturous after-church process of mingling. I’m an introvert.

I want to be part of an honest, open and growing community. It’s going to be tough.

But introversion isn’t an excuse, it’s not enough to say that I find forming relationships difficult, or that I express my emotions more easily to anyone on these pages than to a friend sat across the table from me.

Credit: Jill Donnelly

I am done pretending that I need to be someone else. I am done trying to be the centre of attention, the hub of social groups, the person who is always the last to leave. Because when I try to do these things I find that I am not the centre of attention, I don’t have the glue that brings groups together and it’s just a paranoid fear of missing out that causes me to stick around until the pub closes.

Trying to be someone who I am not has shown up my weakness rather than my strength.

Recently quite a bit has been written about the role of introverts in the church, how they are sidelined by the nature and activities of church, how they are relegated as second class pew fodder, while the extroverts run the show. There is a sort of begrudging acknowledgement of the worth of an introvert’s preferences, a nod to the value of times of silence and solitude. But they are the optional extras of church life, by their very nature they do not come to the fore in the collective life of the congregation.

So I find myself in a tight spot. I want to be a part of a community. I want to know and I want to be known. I want people to look into my life and tell me what they see, I want the heartache of difficulties embraced together and I want the joy of celebrating when we overcome. But I don’t want to do it on the terms that I’m told it needs to be done.

Here’s a peculiar little thing: we value people who are popular and surrounded by others, but we also value travelling light – living with the freedom and the flexibility to move on whenever the next thing comes along. We have made peering over the fence to check if the grass is any greener into an art form. We have embraced superficiality with considerable sophistry.

And often I find that crowds are just another place to hide from people. So maybe our tendency to have lots of people around us is a way to limit how well any one person will know us. When we make to leave our send off will be packed to the rafters but our life will be empty very soon after.

I know that everyone relates differently, for some they can handles having hundreds of friends, for others even a few is a taxing endeavour. So maybe I shouldn’t judge, perhaps I should keep out of this, instead sort out my own life out and leave everyone else to worry about theirs. But that’s just the problem, we hide behind propriety and make great play of our difference as an excuse for our deficiencies; we let each person go about their life in their own way.

And we miss the chance to do it together. Because community means compromise. The giving of the self to serve others, the joining together with people who are not the same. The learning together, the loving each other, the living that brings each of us to life.

I wish I had a ten point plan: community building for introverts. I could market it to the disenfranchised half of the church. But I don’t have that. All I’ve got is a bunch of friends I want to know better, and who I want to know me better.

And maybe, just maybe, one day at a time the layers that disguise us all will give way to a ragged, radical, community.

On epistemological modesty, or knowing that you do not know

Danny Webster Leave a comment

I’ve been reading David Brooks’ tome, The Social Animal, this week, I’m still not sure if it’s a book of fiction or a grand literature review of social science, psychology and behavioural economics. Whatever category I might file it under after I’ve read and digested and passed on and hopefully received back, it is a brilliant book. Maybe it is more than that, every now and then something comes along that transcends our genres and bridges the boxes we build to organise our life.

What he does is to show through the content as well as the style that the boxes we use are arbitrary and often place constraints on our thinking and acting. We think and act in a certain way in certain contexts because we think we ought to.

But this isn’t a review of the book, I’ve still got a third to read so that would be rather odd. Instead it’s a rift off a little phrase that Brooks drops into one of his own tangents that makes the book so special. Throughout he is telling the story of Harold and Erica and he does so by constantly peeling back the covers to show you what is going on below the surface, helping move them along and exploring the decisions that they take and what influences them.

In one chapter Brooks describes one of Erica’s colleagues as ‘epistemologically modest’, and by this he means that he knows that he does not know. And this is a strength rather than a weakness, it’s a bit like the old adage, ‘the more you know the more you know that you do not know’. It is understanding that in coming to terms with your lack of knowledge you open yourself up to learning much more.

It is knowing that knowledge will not answer all your problems. It’s not just an acceptance of how little you know, but an acceptance of how little you can know. It is an awareness that a vast amount of knowledge will remain outside of your grasp.

It is about seeing the world around you as incredibly complex and made up of so many different factors that cannot be boiled down to equations and rational expectations. It’s about scaling back our expectations of what we can predict and project. Because in the end we just don’t know.

I feel a lot like that sometimes. Amid a world of competing charms and vices, I feel lost among what I should know but I do not. I think that certainty is just a beyond my reach, that I can reach it if I just stretch a little more, or try a little harder. I imagine that if I retreat from the pressures of the day and find solace in my solitude, if I explore new surroundings to fire up my creativity I will land upon the answer that I’m searching for.

But the answers don’t come, and if they do they don’t satisfy. Because the barrage of new questions is relentless. It is not enough to know today what you wanted to know yesterday. Because today has questions of its own. Why would a man open fire on children in a Jewish school? Does a trending topic on twitter get God’s attention more than the quiet crying supplications of a loved one coming to terms with the suffering in their home?

Maybe as well as epistemological modesty we need some theological modesty.

Maybe we need to know that we will not know it all. That the answers to the questions that haunt us may well remain unanswered, that the cries of our despair will not always be resolved. That when we lie in the bath wondering if God really created the world, and whether Adam really existed, it is the strength of our faith coming to the fore rather than the depth of our doubts.

If we didn’t have doubts, what value would our belief have?

I wonder if it is essential that we do not know all that we think we would need to know in order to sustain belief, for that belief to actually be worth believing. Therefore, as well as accepting as a point of fact that we do not know the answer to all of our theological questions, we acknowledge that our lack of knowledge is a positive feature rather than the cliff edge of doubt that we could slip off and fall out of the fellowship of believers.

After all we’re not called to learn lots of facts and figures, or just recite theological doctrine, or even understand the trinity, or comprehend the atonement.

We’re called to follow Jesus and that’s what I want to do. Understanding can wait. 

The power of no

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There are so many opportunities in life. A canvas of choices that spread out in front of us. And we have to make the most of it. With so much on offer, who am I to turn it down?

A lot of attention is sometimes given to our tendency to avoid commitment, to opt out of things rather than dive in. I’ve not checked, I’m not sure I want to, but I’m sure there is a self-help book called ‘the power of yes’. If not, someone will surely soon write it. There certainly is a film, and a better book, called ‘Yes Man’. It is about a guy who has become so withdrawn that he says no to everything, never takes a chance, always plays it safe, and therefore stays at home. Doing nothing. The film and the book vary by transatlantic and film director logic but the main character ends up committing to saying yes to everything, no matter what. And the point is that despite the craziness that ensues, life is a lot more fun for his deciding to say yes.

Now I want to be contrary. I don’t think that the lesson we most need to learn is how to say yes more. I think we need to say no.

I went through a phase where I was frustrated by my introspection. I decided to take opportunities, to say yes, go do things I otherwise wouldn’t have done. And it was fun. I made some new friends. I went to a couple of unusual places. And part of that mentality has stuck. But part of it was always there.

Because that’s the thing. In some parts of life I always say yes and need no excuse to push the boat out, except a challenge and agree to ridiculous deadlines 17 minutes before I’m due to leave work for a week’s holiday. I have always enjoyed the sense of challenge of saying yes to things that push me outside of my comfort zone and force me to improve, and get better.

In my social life I’m much less likely to take the initiative, much less likely to push boundaries. I’m more reserved, more hesitated, altogether a whole lot less sure of myself. Perhaps that is why I’ve found it relatively easy to expound in this virtual parish what I would rarely share in person. Even though it has led to a remarkable amount of attention in my face to face world. I say no too easily in my social life. I find it too easy to find an excuse not to go to that party. Or to leave church early without talking to people. Or not to ask that girl out.

Yes I just went there. Because I don’t.

But I’m going to leave that there. And you can just deal with that.

Because that’s not the point I’m trying to make. The lesson I’ve learnt this week is the value of no.

I’ve been ill. I hate being ill. I browse netflix, I watch DVDs of Sharpe, I even contemplate a full week’s run of Come Dine With Me. I lay on the couch for 48 hours. And all the time my phone is buzzing with emails that I can’t answer with any coherence. I talk to colleagues with all the eloquence and clarity of an ogre. And I have to make some tough choices. Because as well as being ill, I’m off on holiday next week. So I have a very finite amount of time to do rather a lot of things.

And that means I have to say no. And on this occasion it meant saying no to one thing in particular. It was the one thing that I didn’t want to say no to. In fact it was really the wise counsel of my mother, still as helpful and necessary as ever, who swung the decision. I’d had an opportunity to do something today which I’d never done before. It would have been fun, it would have been scary, and it was the right thing at the right time and I really wanted to do it.

But I knew that saying no yesterday was the right decision.

Because sometimes we just have to stop.

And not worry about what it costs us. The chances that are missed by refusing to be sold the lie that this is the very thing that will make all others fade in comparison. That if we allow this opportunity to pass us by we will regret it for the rest of our lives.

We wont. I won’t. I don’t.

At the end of the day, what choices are really that critical. At what junctures in life does the decision to go down one path rather than another really affect the overall outcome.

I’m not saying there aren’t better and worse choices. I’m not saying that there isn’t such a thing as guidance from the divine which might indicate one route over another. But nor am I forgetting the redemptive nature of Christ.

The fact that he is in all things, that he is working in and through my very frailties, that he is working to redeem the creation that I inhabit and he has done it all that he may redeem me. That when I turn down something, he still remains. That when I walk away from him. He still remains. When I say no, both to the things that could distract me from doing what he calls me to do, and when I say no to his calling. In both cases he does not desert me.

So I was left wondering, what matters? What commitments and decisions would I not jettison? What do I hold to? For what is my yes so important that I would say no to so many other things?

And perhaps, just a little, it saddens me that there is little to which that applies. For too much of my life is a consumerist existence based on what I chose to think that I need. And when I turn to face it in the cool of the morning, I learn that saying no is sometimes the very thing that I must do.

Saying no is not the means to an end, to achieve space to otherwise fill. It is the means to a beginning. To a start of a life where we don’t accept the logic of the world. That we can let things pass us by. And the world will not collapse.

Celebrity and the Church

Danny Webster 3 Comments


Does the church in the UK need more big name preachers? That’s the challenge that’s been circulating the internet over the past couple of days.

Why, when organising a big conference or festival are speakers imported from overseas, usually from the US, why are worship bands brought over from Australia? I do not think it is just because they are great preachers or worship groups. I think there is something slightly less savoury about it.

It’s because we want to ensure that crowds come, that we hit the break even point. I’ve been in a hall with over 2000 crammed in to listen to Rob Bell, I’ve queued for hours to listen to, and worship with, Hillsong United. If there’s someone with a recognised name on the flyer then it’s a more or less guaranteed way of filling the room.

I’ve travelled across the country, I’ve paid money, I’ve given time. All the symptoms of sacrificial worship. But what is it that I’m worshipping? Is it the God who created all things, or the celebrities on the stage? I’ve also watched in despair as teenage girls queue to have their photo taken with the latest heart-throb worship UK worship leader, and others run across the grass to catch the home grown speaker and talk to them. So that they can then relay through innumerable conversations about when they were talking to so and so.

I’ve criticised such an attitude, and I’ve been called out on it myself. I’ve been close at hand, and raised my eyes to the sky, when other fawn towards the well known names. And then recounted the tale: on one level just so my friends know my contact is superior to the type I’m criticising.

And even telling that tale here, perhaps parading my humility for your own compassion, including the information that I know people you might not, and somehow that puts me in a position of advantage.

Not a lot of people read this blog, but then I don’t know what classifies as a lot. Every now and then I post something which picks up quite a few readers, my post about Mark Driscoll did exactly that. I knew it would, written just hours after the story had first came out, pushed out on twitter and facebook, me doing what I could to encourage people to read my thoughts.

There’s an irony here that nearly knocked me cold as I pondered it last night. I posted Thursday evening just before my small group was about to begin. We were talking about greed and contentment, and all the time my phone was buzzing with tweets about the post, as things drew to a close I checked the comments, found a bunch and saw the stats had gone through the roof. I slipped away into a world of my own, more bothered about what other people were thinking about me and what I wrote, than about the very real relationships with the people in my front room.

I’ve done a little bit of preaching and public speaking, and it petrifies me. I was visiting a church for work and had realised it was a bit bigger than I’d expected, the night before I lay in bed churning over what I was to say, and how I would come across. I was worrying about what they would think of me.

My reputation, whether it is when I speak in person, or when I write is of too much concern to me. I wanted more people to read what I had written all the while discussing avoiding greed and seeking contentment.

So I was reflecting about all this last night while listening to the majestic new and final album from the Dave Crowder Band (buy it!). While wanting more readers I am at the same time uncomfortable with the idea that I am in my own ridiculous microcosm occasionally in a position of authority, not an idea I had really entertained to date. That means that there is a responsibility on me for what I say, how I say it, and how I interact with those reading or listening.

In my criticism of Mark Driscoll, was I fair, was I right, was I right to post it even if I was right in the content? Am I responsible for other people thinking negatively about a fellow Christian? How do I feel about many people I have never met reading my words and interpreting them in their own way?

I wanted the status of being highly read without the responsibility of being in a position of authority.

Surely the church needs the exact opposite, people who can deal with the responsibility of authority without the need for the status?