Just one step at a time

Jim Wallis was over here in the UK, and I’m very grateful a friend let me know he would be talking a church.co.uk about his new book Seven Ways to Change the World.

A few nuggets. He didn’t tell us the 7 ways, and although I bought the book, I’ve not got that far, having found a bunch of friends there too, so went to the pub after.

• When asked what had been the things that had got him most into trouble: Going the places you’re not supposed to go, particularly as a white, middle class Christian. Walking past those invisible ‘No Trespassing!’ signs.
• The 2 big hungers in this world are for spirituality and social action. And the movement that combines both of this will set the world on fire.
• People will get excited about this different kind of faith.
• We’re not to just ignore bad news. Revival is the good news for bad news.
• Politics is broken.
• The most effective social movements - Great Awakenings - have happened when politics has failed to address a major social injustice, and have always had a spiritual foundation.
• Faith is what moves the mountains that are the seemingly impossible social injustices: poverty, trafficking, climate change, racial injustice, and so on.
• Social change requires commitment from each one of us. We need to start in our own lives, lead in our communities and that will make a difference on a bigger scale.
• It takes time. Wilberforce put his first Bill forward 9 times, and it took another 30 years before the slave trade itself was made illegal.
• Charles Finney ‘invented’ the altar call; and got each new Christian to sign up to the anti-slavery movement there and then.
• God needs to be real and personal to sustain the commitment and faith that moves mountains.
• Hope is a choice. Cynicism comes from unsuccessful attempts to bring about a change, but instead of persisting, cynicism gives up and declares nothing can ever change.
• Hope means believing in spite of the evidence. Then watching the evidence change.
• Bad religion calls out of us our bad stuff. We’ve seen a lot of bad religion. We want to see more good religion, which calls out of us our good stuff: compassion, action and so on..

Oh, and I didn’t realise he was married to the REAL Vicar of Dibley, one of the first women to be ordained in the UK, who went on to advise Richard Curtis and Dawn French on the show.

Is was talking about religion over lunch with a colleague. I don’t do this often and I don’t jump in there, evangelistic guns a-blazing. Rather, I listen, try to get where they’re coming from, then pray for them. And for me in my relationship with them. Sounds like a cop-out, I know. But we’re not all born evangelists and apologists.

But the discussion -well, not really a discussion, more a diatribe (have I used that correctly?) of what he thought. Which was along the lines of if he was to follow a religion, it would probably be Islam, because at least their book was written by one guy, and they at least have rules which make sense and are good to live by. And has a huge focus on family and community.

Which made me think… the rules are what I find deeply UNattractive about Islam (well that and the suicide-bombing jihadists and the women-suppressing male leaders. But let’s not talk about the Crusades, that’s not what this post is about). The same with Judaism. But Islam has been hijacked too much for his liking - the true, original Islam is what he’d like. And he’s right. It has. In many areas, Islam has been hijacked by the prevailng culture. So much greatness came out of the early Islamic/Ottoman Empire: culture, science, the works.

Of course, Christianity’s not been hijacked, has it?! I (gently) put that point across. The incorporation of pagan/Roman/Greek ideals - the fact that in the West we celebrate Easter on a pagan feast day, not around Passover, which is when it actually happened. Christmas is another hijacked pagan feast day. Has it assimilated so much of other rituals and superstitions that Christianity has lost its own saltiness?

But there’s often an inner resistance to Christianity in the West. Apparently it’s downfall was the incorporation of materialism, individualism and capitalism, according to my colleague. You don’t say?! That and excommunication - I can’t believe people actually had the gall to do that! Because only a few centuries ago, to excommunicate someone was to say they no longer belonged to society; because society was Christendom, was the church, and to be no longer part of the church meant you had no place. You became a non-person in the eyes of society. I’m glad we’ve moved on from that.

But getting back to my point about rules: we have 2 as Christians.

1. Love God
2. Love others

Everything we do is a part of that (even though we f**k it up so often). It’s about the heart of what believe, the motivation. Not because we’re told to do so. And that’s what makes Christianity so freeing. But also, I guess, makes it look so woolly and wishy-washy. There’re no hard and fast do’s and don’t’s (other than the 10 Commandments, and we all get hung up over our neighbours ass when we talk about them) that you see in Islam. There’s been a certain amount of rhetoric over the last few years about why young men become attracted to Islam, become fundamentalistic suicide bombers. And there’s a lot to be said for an element of certainty in a world that can appear rootless, drifting and excluding to young men of a certain age and race. It can offer that family support in an age of broken families. It can offer a set of rules and codes of behaviour in a society that looks out only for Number One, and that thinks as long as you feel good about it, it’s OK.

But then there are my friends who believe in God. But that’s it. Jesus? Probably not, because He’s harder to get your head - and heart - around.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. There’s a ‘why?’, I guess. Why do you or I believe? And a ‘what?’: what do we believe?

What & Why. What a merry pair of bedfellows they make. I think they snuggle up with Faith, because without her, they don’t make sense on her own. And that’s what people so often miss or haven’t experience.