As I come to the end of 47 days of writing on Luke’s gospel in this blog, I thought I’d attempt some kind of closing reflection. Maybe it would be useful for readers to learn just a little about my own experience with outsiders like those who appear in Luke. So, my story is this: over many years I have been concerned with outsiders in society and in the church.
When I ministered in Versailles in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of the congregation were Portuguese ‘guest workers’ who took care of the innumerable day to day tasks involved in keeping an affluent and fastidious community clean and functioning. Incidentally, it was at Versailles that I first came into contact with someone with Aids. A remarkable story of God’s grace ensued but that will be for another time.
Later, in Toulouse, between and 1995 and 2002, I became involved with the homeless for the simple reason that there was a ragged man sleeping on the steps of our church until late in the day and I had to make a decision about trying to get him to leave or inviting him in. By sharing coffee with him I discovered a new world for me with each new story of hard times being quite unique. I met a gifted jazz musician who would buy a guitar every month with his unemployment money, lose it in some drunken incident and then earn his money by whistling in the street. There was an estate agent, a cartoonist, a man fluent in a number of languages and with an impressive knowledge of world literature and philosophy but who would rave in the street. A fine-looking young man and woman who deteriorated before my eyes into toothless, hunched figures of fear in the inner city, known generally as, ‘The couple from hell.’
For several years in Toulouse, I was involved with others in giving breakfast three times a week to sometimes as many as forty homeless people at one time in very cramped surroundings. Towards the end of the morning, I would read the Bible and discuss it with a group of the people who came. There was no coercion to attend but those who did were happy for these sessions to go on for hours. I made a selection of readings from the New Testament as a monthly cycle for these discussions. At that time, I was endlessly frustrated because I wondered how long it would take for these people to join the church. By this, I meant start coming to Sunday services, perhaps be baptised and come into full membership of the fellowship. I wish I’d realised then that they were already in the church, maybe with a greater commitment than some of the more conventional attenders. It was a poor church – as the pastor, I was the only one with a car – and I used to joke that ours was the only fellowship I knew whose offering went down as the membership count went up – and that was even before the Sunday when one of the members stole the collection. It was only later that I came to realise that church is more than Sunday morning at eleven and that even though the accounts didn’t look good, the experience had been very rich indeed.
It took my return to the UK in 2002 for me to come to understand that everything Christians do is Church – and that that includes leisure activities and what is done in the workplace as well as reading the Bible with the homeless. I came to this realisation by an unusual route, although I should also give due credit to the books of the Australian James Thwaites who wrote ‘The Church beyond the Congregation’ and ‘Renegotiating the Church Contract’. I came to understand this in an surprising way: Sunday morning activities outside the church for children have become more and more of a drain on Christian families during my lifetime and the pressure to be involved in them is very hard indeed to resist for parents in church communities. I observed one family where the parents were vehement that their children would never skip church for football but who changed their minds in pretty short order when the boys were seen to have talent on the soccer field. I began a simple service for them before they left for the game, but I also began to affirm Christian presence at the match as Church activity. I refused to play the guilt card.Everything seemed to follow from that course of action.
I remember once in Toulouse giving a sermon series on Luke’s gospel, focusing on the way Jesus brought back into the Judaism of his day people who were excluded from the system for one reason or another – perhaps because of lifestyle issues or an illness which rendered them ritually unclean. I think this is still a valid approach to Luke but nowadays I think the gospel writer’s concern and that of Jesus himself is yet wider and speaks of God’s love for all outsiders whether with regard to Judaism or more generally. Over the last two years of my ministry in Wales, I preached the substance of this Luke, Stranger blog and this reflection has helped me to see God active increasingly in all kinds of places.
While I have been in Wales and under the influence of Thwaites and my own growing conviction that ‘everything is church’, my own activities have become more and more varied and less and less characteristic of what a Baptist minister traditionally does. My work as a piano and French teacher has been taking more and more of my time and I play in bands and even teach a little theology in the university as well as sometimes giving ‘thought for the day’ type talks on BBC radio. I should point out that my church called me with the brief to be involved in the community and I have certainly done that. I am very grateful to the church for affirming me in what I have been doing.I also want to say that to be a piano teacher is a privileged role that brings you close not only to children but also to families: it has been a common occurrence for my expertise as a pastor to be called upon at some distance from the church community in some crisis of bereavement, illness, professional insecurity and so on.
The American preacher and writer AW Tozer said that because of his uncompromising teaching ministry he had preached himself off every platform in the United States. I think that, as I preached once again through Luke, this time focusing on the outsiders who throng its pages, I preached myself ‘outside the camp’ – in the words of the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews. I came to realise that my place now is not be inside the church looking out but on the borders of the church with no titles or position to disguise or obscure the fact that I am just an ordinary person who happens to be a Christian. That has been a liberation in itself and it already feels like a good place.
I am still a Baptist minister, at least on paper, but I haven’t preached or led a service except in France for perhaps three months now. I am a man of far fewer words than I have ever been for thirty years and have been exploring a link with the Quakers that has been increasingly important to me for perhaps the last six or seven years. As well as a healthy respect for silence, the Quakers are activists in the quest for world peace and social justice, and I love that emphasis.
I began to attend the Meeting for Worship of the Society of Friends on my free Sundays because I felt I needed an emphasis on silence and listening as a contrast to the welter of words and ideas with which a minister in the pulpit is involved. I must say, that the last full Baptist service I attended (I wasn’t leading it) mystified me. I wondered what all these repetitive and, I felt, simplistic songs were for and why the prayers were so strangely disconnected with the world of refugees and Brexit. I wondered whether the person who preached with such animation really had that much to say about the Bible passage chosen. This is not meant to be dismissive or critical, by the way, and I am perfectly happy to ask the same questions of my own practice.
Opportunities for ministry have not been lacking since stepping down from the church here so my long and expensive training and my decades of experience have not gone to waste as I initially feared they might. I have continued to visit some members whom I have been helping for many years. What I said about getting alongside the piano pupils and their families when trouble comes continues to be true, unfortunately. The daily discipline of writing this blog has clarified many things for me and I have valued the feedback I have received as well as the thrill of sharing my thoughts on Luke with people in over thirty countries. The next task is to translate it into French. I even ministered briefly in the Quaker meeting once, speaking with rare restraint for a Baptist minister for just one minute about the distinctive, silent contribution of the Friends to a national outpouring of prayer connected with the brutal murder of the British Member of Parliament, Jo Cox.
Perhaps most important of all have been my trips to take supplies to the refugees in the Calais Jungle. Not everyone in my community agrees with this type of support and it has sometimes felt an uncomfortable course of action in the painfully polarised debate over Brexit with its focus on immigration, but there is a good group of very compassionate people here who are happy to encourage these visits with gifts of clothes, food and even money.
On one trip, my American friend who, as a minister in France, has found himself plunged into the midst of this humanitarian crisis, asked me to share with a group of young Iranians in their tent something of my own Christian journey. I think my colleague wanted me to speak about a conversion experience and I suppose I did in a way, because I found myself reflecting on the way God leads us sometimes imperceptibly in the long term rather than by any miraculous signs or spectacular specific guidance. I told them about how my studies in French at university and my piano lessons as a boy with the elderly lady up the road (about whom I think every day as I teach) as well as theological study and thirty years of church ministry in the UK and then in France and finally back in Wales had brought me to that particular group of refugees in all of their fear and insecurity. I heard myself encouraging them with the thought that life is long and that the Calais Jungle is just one place and one time in their earthly pilgrimage. Other times and other places will become possible for them, whether in Teheran, London or New York or who knows where.
Maybe, I was really speaking to myself – people tend to do a lot of that and I am no exception. These last few months have sometimes felt precarious but also strangely exhilarating: it takes a lot of faith to ‘go into the church’ but it takes a lot of faith to leave it, too. This final post of Luke, Stranger is very much an interim report.
That verse from Exodus comes to my mind: ‘You have made the sovereign Lord your refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms.’ These words remind me that there is no escape from the love of God. All kinds of exclusion are practised by human beings and some of these are done in the name of religion. With God himself, though, there is no excluding. ‘The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost’ and there are many ways of coming home.
lukestrangerblog 