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)

At the very centre of the village

The other Sunday two teenagers, Hannah Whillis and Adam Blaikie joined Hilton Church in Inverness: baptised there as babies, they were now professing personal faith. In preparation the church’s excellent youth minister Jonathan Fraser led them through not a dry course in the implications of church membership, but what he called an ‘apprenticeship’ in following Jesus.

Adam Blaikie and Hannah Whillis

They committed over a ten week period to pray and study with Jonathan, and to get involved practically in acts of mercy, compassion, devotion, justice and worship: for example they helped at Highland Foodbank; talked about their faith with friends; Hannah wrote to prisoners; they both mentored Christians younger than themselves. At the end of the process, they had, Jonathan said, a template for following Jesus throughout the rest of their lives.

This month sees the 70th anniversary of the execution in a German prison camp of 39-year-old pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who resisted the Nazis, helped form a Nazi-free breakaway church, served as a double agent, and (though initially a pacifist) was implicated in plots to assassinate Hitler. He also wrote deep, searching theology, including The Cost of Discipleship, a challenge to follow Jesus in difficult times.

His life reminds us that walking the road of discipleship as Adam and Hannah are doing calls for discernment. The German people in general embraced Hitler as the saviour who would restore their nation after the catastrophe of World War I and the ensuring Depression. Some Christians saw him as a God-given deliverer. One pastor allegedly said ‘Christ is come to us through Adolf Hitler.’

But from the very first, just after Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, Bonhoeffer spoke of the danger of a Feuhrer (leader) becoming a verfeuhrer (mis-leader). And yet in time the Lutheran Church to which Bonhoeffer belonged was taken over by Nazi sympathisers.

We protest that we wouldn’t have been so short-sighted. The sober truth is that most of us would. And so we must reflect on the leaders and ideas we set store by as Christians.

It’s easy in our fear to brush aside all new things, and cling to what we think we know. To do this is to risk rejecting Christ as he comes to us in new ideas and new perspectives. But it’s easy too to deludedly follow a verfeuhrer, welcoming ideas and embracing visionaries as coming from Christ when in fact he disowns them.

I’m concerned this election time at the bitterness of some social media posts about the campaign which latch on to certain leaders as saviours, and demonise the rest. Ultimately, only the grace of Christ can change the spirit of a nation. The most powerful among us are as children, confused and perplexed.

Bonhoeffer recognised that there were good people on both sides of the debate in German and in his book Ethics he writes to those perplexed about the ideas they should run with that ‘if a man asks humbly, God will give him certain knowledge of his will.’ (For all his clarity of thought he was a man of his time when it came to non-inclusive language!)

Discipleship, according to Bonhoeffer also requires engagement in all the areas Jonathan led Hannah and Adam through. And the extent of our obedience to God is a measure of the genuineness of our faith – ‘only he who is obedient believes’; ‘Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.’

Faith must express itself, Bonhoeffer argues. If our faith is real we will not be content to corral it in our hearts and minds while the rest of our living is indistinguishable from those around us.

‘The church stands, not on the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.’ Not a last resort we turn to when we’ve run out of ideas, but in the very centre of the community modelling new ways of thinking and acting. In foodbanks and prisons and market squares, not just comforting victims of injustice and violence, but driving ‘a spoke into the wheel’ of unjust systems.

Speaking personally, the word ‘discipleship’ makes me cringe because of memories of books and courses and hoops to jump through. But the idea of loving, responding to, saying ‘Yes’ to Jesus and thus making my part of the world a better place: this, I gladly embrace.

Adam and Hannah are walking into an ever-changing future, but discipleship remains the same: openness to the living Jesus, God-given discernment, engagement with the world. Bonhoeffer warns humourously:  ‘I fear that Christians who stand on earth on only one leg will stand in heaven on one leg too.’  Those who will embrace the world to come with the most joy are those who have, in this dimension, been at the very centre of the village.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 16th April 2015)