The road goes ever on

‘You’ve come on Curry Wednesday!’ they tell me when I drop in to the church office for a chat. Simeon Ewing and Fiona Waite have recently joined the youth team at Hilton Church, managed by Youth Pastor Jonathan Fraser.

I’m preparing an article about their work for the church web-site, and we have a wide-ranging conversation about the children and youth activities they’re involved with in church and community. Simeon is the church’s Children’s Worker; Fiona a ‘Ministry Apprentice’ working with young people in the church and in Hilton generally three days a week, while studying at Highland Theological College the other two days.

And Curry Wednesday? Each Wednesday one of the team prepares an Indian meal which the three of them share, as a means of building their working and personal relationships.

I’m always fascinated to hear different people’s experiences of Christianity, and so I asked Fiona and Simeon what faith is like for them.

They spoke about coming to faith. For Fiona, it began when she heard ‘about the Bible in a different way that actually related to my life’ and ‘about having a relationship with God.’ For Simeon there was a particular place and time. At the age of just 4, he tells me, ‘I committed my life to Jesus.’ He’d seen his parent’s faith, and, he says ‘I knew there was some decision I had to make to start the journey myself.’

Both believe that God speaks to them. God is heard in ‘a very strong sense’ or impression that a particular course of action is right; in ‘an inner peace’ about the way ahead; in the awakening within them of words from the Bible; in the advice of others when somehow it makes a home within them; in a sense of ‘conviction’ when a wrong decision has been made.  

Both believe that God is leading them through life, though they admit to taking wrong turnings along the way! This journey has both an outer dimension of work and learning and relationships, and a closely linked inner dimension of developing and maturing faith.

I think all of us as Christians reflecting on our lives will find those elements present: a coming to faith; a sense of God ‘speaking’ (however that works in our experience); and a conviction that God calls us on a journey of being and becoming.

Fiona and Simeon’s words encourage us, but we don’t need to feel we must have exactly the same beliefs or identical experiences as our fellow-Christians – although some Christians give the impression at times that their particular way of believing and experiencing is the only ‘correct’ way, the only way God accepts.

But in fact we all have different personalities, different backgrounds, different experiences of being parented, and we all belong to different traditions within the Christian church. And so our expectations of what encountering God ‘feels like’, and the words and ideas we use to describe our beliefs will be different. We are each unique, and the Father of Jesus comes to each of us in ways utterly appropriate to who we are.

Perhaps we don’t speak often enough in church about the terrain across which the journey leads many of us. We find ourselves reluctantly moving from a place of security in a particular set of long-held beliefs, to a place where we question everything we have ever believed.  Eventually we arrive in a wider place, still rooted in our faith in Christ (in fact more rooted than ever), but comfortable now with unanswered questions. We look across church and world seeing no longer ‘them’ and ‘us’ but increasingly simply ‘us.’

We discover that people in faith traditions outwith Christianity have very similar experiences to ours although they do not share our faith in Jesus Christ. Are these experiences false, or is Jesus bigger than we had ever imagined, connecting deeply with people who do not yet recognise him?

Simeon and Fiona are near the start of their journeys. I am impressed by the authenticity of their faith stories, the reality of their joy. And impressed too by the love which they have for children and young people. ‘I want to tell them God loves them,’ Simeon simply.

I am convinced that love is the most important thing, and that God looks not so much at the specifics of our beliefs, but at how well we reflect the love of Jesus Christ.

We can’t go it alone on this journey, but we support one another as we travel in Love, and into Love. It’s impressive to see the bond which Jonathan and his team have. Curry Wednesday. A kind of eucharist in tikka masala, pilau rice and coffee.  Thank you, Father.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 17th March 2016)

Fathomless Riches

Richard Coles. Member of the chart-topping 1980s group The Communards, inspiration for a gay character in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, BBC Radio presenter, and now an Anglican Vicar in Northamptonshire.

He’s just published his autobiography Fathomless Riches: or how I went from Pop to Pulpit, an honest and perceptive statement of the power of God to transform one man’s life.

At one point Richard Coles says ‘try not to make assumptions about people whose lives are unimaginably different from your own.’ Which, given our tendency to be suspicious of those we consider are ‘not like us’ is worth bearing in mind as we read this book.

Some of us will identify with Richard Coles’s experience more than others as he shares his story. That boyhood sense of only being fully at home in church. The teenage rejection of Christianity. The love of music. The recognition that he is gay. A suicide attempt. Immersion in 1980s gay culture and left wing protest. The stresses of stardom. The power of friendship. Drugs. The dark shadow of AIDS.

The author’s take on all this is fascinating, but were times when I longed for a little less detail, and a little less relish in the telling. I almost abandoned the book half way through, but I’m so glad I persevered and reached Richard Coles’s moving description of his journey into faith. He expresses so well the experience of following Jesus.

His encounter with God followed a rock-bottom moment when he realised that the hedonistic life was killing him, ‘I knew I had to stop or I would die.’ He tentatively reconnected with church, drawn by a memory of the peace he’d sensed in church as a boy, and by a hunger which nothing else satisfied.

‘And then,’ he writes, describing his experience at a High Church service ‘It was as if iron bands, constricting my chest, broke and fell away and I could breathe; and a shutter was flung open, and light flooded in and I could see. And I wept and wept.’

He describes the early days of this new-found in God, when ‘the mystery of God was as vivid as anything I have ever experienced,’ contrasting it with what followed later when God grew  ‘more elusive, or indirect.’  He discovered the importance of keeping his antennae unfurled to ‘find the signal among the static,’ to ‘pick up the so often drowned-out or ignored frequencies by which God broadcasts his strange grace.’

I loved Richard Coles’s insistence that the way God spoke to him, and the life God called him to were perfectly tailored to his personality and abilities. ‘Some people can think their way into faith,’ he says, adding ‘I couldn’t.’ For him, God connected through the power of richly decorated churches and colourful liturgies, and in particular of symbols. The content of Angela Tilby’s book Won’t you join the dance? was ‘a revelation.’ But what spoke most powerfully was the title – that image of Christian faith as a joyful dance to which all are invited.

And he realised that he was called to a work ‘matched to the reality of who I was and where I was and what I was and what God might do with that.’

I loved his description of the power of St Paul’s letters in the Bible as he studied them in the original Greek. ‘They came alive, those dense endless sentences suddenly flowing like rivers through a wilderness.’

And I loved Coles’s acknowledgement of our continuing dependence on God. The long-term process of conversion, ‘the turning away from our fascination with ourselves’ continues as we ‘give the completely unexpected reality of God a look in.’ We can’t, Coles insists,  ‘make holiness look real’ and bring comfort to those mired in despair. Only Jesus can do this. And so ‘our job is not to get in the way, not to make it impossible for Jesus to make his home in us, taking on our strange shapes and dissonances and tuning them to his purposes.’

I loved Coles’s sensitivity to other people, his recognition that ‘Goodness abounds and may surprise us.’  His book, with its fine expression of spiritual principles which resonate with all Christians is a challenge to us to joyfully recognise what God is doing in those around us as they cop an earful of the music.

Those we might consider to be ‘other’ because of their different ways of experiencing and expressing their faith are embraced by the God to whom none of us is ‘other’. Once we realise that all of us in God’s motely family are nourished by the same Holy Spirit, blessed in the same ‘fathomless riches’ of Christ we will regard those we once thought ‘other’ as other no more, but sisters, brothers.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 6th November 2014)