New Wine matures

What happens when a new movement of the Spirit enters middle age? 

I was left wondering this recently as we celebrated ten years of attending New Wine, the summer camp that has grown out of the evangelical charismatic wing of the C of E, with its origins in St. Andrew's Chorleywood, UK. From small beginnings in the late 80s, some Christian friends in a field, the movement has grown to number 24,000 attendees, all eager to pump some kingdom renewal and encouragement into their veins before returning to their churches and communities to make a difference.

Every stream of Christianity has its weak points and blind spots, and the charismatic movement is no exception. New Wine is on its third generation of leaders, people now more our less our age. What has changed, what has developed and what has felt like a growing up? Three things stood out this summer for me.

1. Diversity.

I'll be honest: New Wine hasn't always been the most affirming place for an aspiring woman bible teacher/preacher/leader. A plethora of male role models seems to have (at last) given way to something more diverse. For the first time this year I was obliged to choose between women speakers of an evening, across three different venues. I don't recall this happening before. From conversations about the circular problem of why there aren't many women bible teachers/speakers (women don't want to put themselves forward, therefore there aren't many women speaking; nothing can be done about this) we seem to have arrived at the happy position of having a really good number. Even my mornings were spent happily listening to a woman bring the bible to life, alongside a man: different approaches, different blessing. It meant that through the 6 days of morning and evening teaching, I listened to a total of 6 women and 7 men. To some this won't be an issue, but to me, just right now, it is still important. The women were always out there, of course; these things are often problems of imagination, as much as problems of reality. I was left thinking (happily) 'well that wasn't so difficult...'

2. Charismatic/contemplative worship.

The 'Acoustic' Venue (quite a departure from the big Arena norm) is my natural millieu. Here are no massive drum kits, electric guitars, people jumping up and down or famous Christian bands selling their CDs. Instead there are musicians whom no one has heard of, just doing their thing and getting out of the way when necessary. We experimented in worship with 'psalm surfing', i.e. singing the refrain of a psalm over and over, interspersed with short songs and tongues singing, but always coming back to the psalm, the effect of which was not unlike how I imagine the chanting at Taize, the Roman Catholic monastery in France. We sang lament, never far form the Psalmist's repertoire, because lament is the natural response of looking at injustice and crying out to God as to why he appears to be absent. As Richard Foster has pointed out in Streams of Living Water, joyously, the charismatic and the contemplative are not as far apart as one might imagine, and sometimes worship brings us eventually to silence (see an earlier post on 'either/or' spirituality

http://www.parttimepriest.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Charismatic)

3. Theologies of suffering alongside healing.

A third and major theological stumbling block for me within the charismatic movement (until recently) has been the insistence on miraculous physical healing, when for the most part my experience has been that good people, people you pray for, people who fill our churches, regularly get ill and die. I understand that when you are trying to redress the balance (the equally erroneous view that God is always silent on healing) you have to put the other side of the story forcefully, especially in the light of the example of Jesus. But in the past I have struggled with stories of miraculous healings of people who've slipped over in the shower on the campsite, etc. What about those who get cancer and die, like the person whose miraculous recovery from something terminal we all cried out for one year in the main meeting, fervently, ardently; all 6000 of us. I think she was married to one of the leaders. She died in the autumn. 

But the stories had more authenticity this year, resulting in me coming home (weirdly) with a stronger conviction than ever, that God does bring healing, in whatever way he wills, and wanting to take that into church and community. The stories were much more, yes, someone was prayed for; they appeared to get better but then the illness returned and they died. But the years had shown that the faithfulness of God had not failed - he had worked out his purposes in succeeding generations and prayer always made a difference. In other words, reality. 

In these three ways  - diversity, contemplation and balancing healing/suffering, I wonder if, alongside New Wine, now in its 26th year, I might be growing up, maturing, like good wine is supposed to....?

A Smile on the Face of God

I first read A Smile on the Face of God in 1993 whilst living in Eastbourne on the south coast. 

Adrian Plass was a local author then, famous in the Christian world for his sideways glance at the sometimes odd things we do in church, but which nonetheless don't stop God from working healing and forgiveness into the most mundane or hopeless situations, often through those who have come to terms with their own brokenness.

The subject of his beautifully written biography knows all about brokenness - he is Father Philip Ilott, an Anglo Catholic priest whose life has been characterised by unusual suffering - emotional, spiritual and physical. 

Born in 1936, Philip was an unwanted baby whose dysfunctional relationship with his mother (he was sexually abused from a young age) defined much of his life. A period of singing in a Cathedral choir provided an awareness of something spiritual, greater than himself and his own troubles, and gradually the ceremony, incense and meaningful ritual he encountered there drew him towards Anglo Catholic worship. After a spell of very real and lively Church Army Evangelicalism, he took Holy Orders in 1967.

He finds some happiness in marriage and family life, though his dark childhood traumas still lie buried deep within. As is the way of things, these surface through irrational behaviour and a tendency to overwork. He collapses one day in church, and, extremely worried, his wife and the doctors advocate rest. But the blackouts get worse. His condition is finally diagnosed as epilepsy. He must give up parish ministry completely. Absolutely mortified, Philip tries to hide the dreadful situation from the rest of the church for as long as possible. Will God really let his whole role and identity as a priest be taken away so ignominiously? 

When a visiting preacher says he has come to offer him the gift of healing, rather than being delighted, he feels embarrassed, but agrees to go through with a midweek healing service in church, with some parishioners coming to pray and offer support. But he is mortified. A priest serves others; should he be so feeble as to need others' prayer for his own weakness and physical failing?

Philip feels justified in his scepticism of miraculous healing however, when his epilepsy worsens shortly afterwards. But God has other ideas. Exactly three months later, another visitor (this time, ironically, the local Church Army Captain) comes to him enthusing about the 'gifts of the Spirit' after some local involvement in a Charismatic group. This time he allows his hopes to be slightly raised, trying to be polite to this keen fellow Christian, but he feels on balance it's 'not for him'. 

But in the kitchen, about to wash up a mug after his visitor has left, Philip is suddenly overwhelmed by the healing presence of God. Like the haemorrhaging woman who touched Jesus' cloak, he somehow 'knows' in his spirit he has been healed. He says to his wife, 'I feel like I've been 'born again' again!' His epilepsy completely disappears, never to return. 

This extraordinary physical healing begins to impact church life immediately, as Philip begins a monthly healing service in the context of Benediction, an Anglo Catholic contemplation of the Blessed Sacrament. Soon others are being healed in various ways, some receive the gift of tongues, which heals their emotional life, sometimes leading to physical healing. There is no blueprint; all cases are different; and not all are physically healed. Throughout, as praying priest and one who wants to offer God's blessing whatever the outcome, he relies on the inner voice of God to guide him, sometimes against all the odds. 

One of the most remarkable accounts of gradual physical healing is of a baby who is brought to him with life threatening encephalitis and water on the brain. Several sessions of prayer and laying on of hands by Philip and the baby's mother and grandmother, and the baby recovers completely, to the astonishment of the local hospital.

All the while, however, dark memories from the past haunt Father Philip. The things that happened at home at night when his father was in the War. His parents' agonising fights. The un-forgiveness he harbours towards his father for never standing up to his mother. The feelings of bing unwanted in the womb. He knows he must eventually confront them and seeks prayer from an experienced fellow priest. This results in some distressing, vividly recalled episodes as he brings before God's Spirit the memories which have lain buried for so long. The Eucharist brings him immense comfort in this context, as he contemplates how we are fed by Christ, even as the placenta feeds an unborn baby.

Throughout his faithful and prayerful parish ministry, in a number of different settings, Father Ilott's life is a mysterious mixture of trauma, healing, pain, release and disease. He prays unstintingly for the most difficult parishioners, sometimes going into the church at night to sit in the pews where they sit, and feel the things they feel which make them react the way they do. He is challenged  as a young priest by powerful people he cannot stand up to, and plagued by impotency as if still a child.

He has prophetic dreams which appear to mark different periods of his ministry. In one he himself is being crucified. After a long spell in a happy Isle of White parish, he takes a disastrous appointment to a wealthy Sussex parish which turns out not to be in keeping with his humble and spiritual approach. He feels all he is wanted for is to be a guest at sherry parties. On the day of his installation (he only stays 18 months) he has an overwhelming feeling 'that I was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time'.

But even in the next parish the road is not smooth. In another dream he is in a wheelchair and the Lord leads him to a locked door. He asks Philip if he will open the door with a heavy key. He has the choice. He decides he will. Beyond the open door he sees hundreds of people suffering various illnesses, maimed, hurting, in wheelchairs. The dream finds real life fulfilment as Father Ilott, settling into this new parish, becomes seriously ill for the second time - losing the feeling in his limbs one by one. Again he is mortified at being so weak and unable to continue his parish duties. Hospital tests ensue: this time the diagnosis is devastating. Incurable MS. 

Again he must contemplate giving up parish ministry, and this time he feels it may well be forever. Finally, at the end of his own resources, he visits Walsingham, the Catholic place of pilgrimage in Norfolk. Mary the mother of Jesus has played an increasing part in his spirituality, a poignant image of the loving mother he never had. Here, sitting in peaceful contemplation in his wheelchair, in the half light of the small church, he feels she is asking him to endure his suffering for sake of her son and for others. Instead of being a busy parish priest leading a church, he will becoming someone to whom many sick and hurting people come for spiritual prayer and counsel, though at great cost to himself. 

This is more or less how the book ends, though with a surprising postscript...

Sometimes people say that faith is for people who can't cope with real life, but there's enough 'real 'life' in the story of Philip Ilott for most of the rest of us. 

As well as his deep experiences of suffering and healing he seems to have been someone with a strong awareness of the paranormal, describing at least three occasions when he either saw objects moving by themselves, or had an intimate conversation with someone who had died. One time, in anguished prayer for his troubled teenage daughter, he 'sees' her as a new born baby floating down the aisle in church, helpless and needing his love. It is this which teaches him to value his family as much as his beloved ministry.

I loved the book the first time I read it, especially since living in Sussex around about the time the story draws to a close (1989) I could imagine some of the places where Father Philip found himself. Now I'm a minister too, I mine the story for ways of being which promote prayerfulness, facing reality and being aware that God still longs to pour healing into many situations and lives, whether healing of relationships, conversion, emotional healing, physical healing, or resilience in the face of continued suffering.

For we are complex beings, driven sometimes by forces from the past, or from spiritual realms of which we are unaware. And God desires our wholeness, our final 'conversion'.

The story of Father Philip Ilott is a powerful reminder that we often swim in some murky depths which only Christ can heal; that forgiveness and healing after even the most damaging of actions can be possible in Christ. 

The ongoing life of Christ in the sacraments, prayer, confession, spiritual gifts and bible study are the means by which the Spirit of God cleanses, heals, renews and sets us free; and the means by which we offer that freedom to one another.

Two 'novel' takes on suffering

Two books I read recently shared a similar theme and got me thinking about the perennial question often held up against religion - the problem of suffering. How much of it is our fault; how much is undeserved, and is there a God in it all?

It's a theme around which one treads carefully as an ordained Minister. I felt a bit bad recently when a group I belong to was being encouraged to signal commitment by attending all scheduled meetings, and all I kept thinking was - well, we'll try, but what about the sudden death of a loved one, or sudden illness or accident...none of us knows what is around the corner. A bit morbid, I know. That's perhaps what taking a lot of funerals, and frequently working with bewildered and bereaved people, does to you.

The Cellist of Sarajevo is a grim reminder of how the innocent suffer in war. More than 11,000 men, women and children were killed during the 44 month long Sarajevo siege, which is the book's subject. It begins with a mortar landing in a bakery queue, killing 22 civilians. A cellist, witnessing this atrocity from the window of his flat, decides to play Albinoni's Adagio every day there for 22 days, to honour the dead. 

Meanwhile the novel explores the everyday life of three disconnected residents of Sarajevo and how they deal with the struggle for existence in a city where even buying bread and fetching water are life threatening activities. Their fears are detailed minutely, but they seem rather under developed as people - the main character is really the city and what it has sadly become.

The philosophical question of the novel centres around a female sniper calling herself Arrow, who is charged with guarding the cellist from a distance, but this means killing in order to prevent him being killed. The morality of killing in war and who is in fact the enemy, is complicated enough for her eventually to abandon her identity as a sniper, which she finally does, by reclaiming her real name in the last sentence of the novel, seconds before the arrival of other killers, sent to kill the one who no longer wants to kill.

There should have been palpable tension but I found the whole thing a bit muted and flat, and I was left feeling underwhelmed by the book as a portrayal of human suffering. There was an overwhelming amount of local place detail and hardly any deeper exploration of relationships. I plodded through, out of a kind of loyalty to those who suffered in the real siege, but sadly I wouldn't say my mind, heart or soul were in any way expanded. 

In contrast, I became instantly hooked on John Green's The Fault in our Stars, unable to put it down until the final gut wrenching page. It made me think afresh about whether it is appropriate to expect meaning to emerge from what seems to be entirely undeserved suffering. 

Because that's what we want, in the end, to make sense of it all.

The subject is children dying of cancer, which sounds so morbid, but the book is clever, profound and funny as well as being immensely sad. It's full of witty one-liners which peel back the mask of all cancer sufferers being saintly and heroic, to reveal otherwise entirely normal people who do not primarily wish to be defined by their illness.

Hazel, a sixteen year with terminal lung cancer, starts attending a Support Group in the local church. It's full of clichés and platitudes ('the Support Group, was, of course, depressing as hell') but there she meets Augustus Waters, amputee and gorgeous seventeen year old, who proceeds to (successfully) persuade her to be his girlfriend.

At first she resits because as he is in remission and she will die one day soon, she wants to spare him any pain; but they fall in love anyway, sharing as they do an acerbic sense of humour and love of reading. In a romantic trip to Amsterdam they track down an author whose own cancer novel Hazel loves, only to discover he is an embittered alcoholic with a penchant for telling hurtful truths. On returning home, Augustus reveals he has has relapsed into final stage cancer: it will now be Hazel who is left to mourn. 

The big questions are all there - mortality being the one which frames all the others, of course. Rumbling away in the philosophical background is how we deny our own mortality, until inevitably faced with it. Hazel observes 'whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But in fact depression is not a side effect of cancer - it's a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.'

Religion is present but shaded: the support group takes place inside an Episcopal church, described by Hazel: 
'We all sat in a circle, right in the middle of the cross, right where the boards would have met, where the heart of Jesus would have been'. 

It's noteworthy that John Green was a hospital Chaplain before becoming a writer, which he refers to at the back of the book: 'I was a terrible chaplain - for one thing I often fainted at the sight of blood. Also I never knew what to say to anyone, or how to comfort them (...) I kept the Book of Common Prayer in one pocket and it was always banging against my knee'. 

I can't help thinking that writing this book was Green trying to come to terms with what he couldn't do as a twenty two year old Chaplain on a children's cancer ward - make sense of the apparent randomness of an illness which can prematurely and cruelly end the life of a young person.

There is no 'problem' of suffering unless we start from the premise that life should be happy, meaningful and whole. If we're all here by chance and heading for oblivion, 'suffering' is just normal existence: 'the fault is in our stars' (a quote from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar). But if we're here looking for purpose and some higher good, then we will continue to grapple what CS Lewis called 'the problem of pain' and people will continue to write novels that either dabble in the subject, or plunge in with abandon. 

Green has done the latter, and having laughed and cried my way through it, I do get a sense (admittedly with ministerial antenna out) that at the centre of it all, and at the centre of all Christian explorations of suffering, albeit often hidden from many participants, is the fact of the crucified one. 

Lent for Extroverts 15: Why suffering ?

Sermon, Third Sunday in Lent
1 Corinthians 10:1-13Warnings from Israel’s History
We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents. And do not complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. These things happened to them to serve as an example...

Luke 13:1-9

Repent or Perish

At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.He asked them, ‘Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. 

It’s often thought that suffering drives people away from believing in God.

‘The question of suffering’ is cited as evidence that there is no God, or if He exists, He must be a monster.

With both our readings touching on undeserved suffering and on judgement, I’d like us to look at this question from 3 different angles.

·      Firstly, is it the case that the ‘problem of suffering’ drives people away from God per se?

Or are there other factors involved?

·      Secondly, is the question of suffering one that can be asked in isolation from real life?

·      And thirdly, what does the Cross say to the question of suffering?

1.  So firstly, does this difficult question drive people away from faith in God?

We discussed the question of suffering at our recent Lent Course on Wednesday evening and it produced some interesting thoughts, which I’ll come back to.

But if it were true that the question of ‘why is there suffering in the world?’ drives people away from faith, surely it would follow that those who suffer mos (in war, from hunger, infant mortality, lack of education) would be the ones who found it hardest to believe in a good God.

And those who generally enjoyed a good lifestyle, positive life experiences, enough to eat and lack of war and conflict, would be the ones who found it easiest to believe in God.

In fact it appears that the reverse is true.

Active faith in God is far more prevalent in the ‘Third World’ than in the ‘First World.’

Globally the Anglican Church is growing, though that growth is almost entirely in the global South, whilst in the affluent West, belief in God is dwindling, if we are to believe the surveys.

Having said all that, it does appear from our readings that people have always been exercised by the question of suffering.

And mostly people are exercised when they themselves are facing suffering.

Which takes us to our second point.

 2. Secondly,can you talk about suffering as a merely academic topic anyway?

The writer, Stanley Hauerwas is well known for tackling this problem and is one of the best writers on the actual effect of personal suffering on someone’s life as well as asking the academic question ‘Why does God allow suffering?’

He writes: ‘Sitting in my office, reflecting on the problem of evil is more like a game than a serious activity. I am not even sure that I have the right to engage in such speculation…’ (Naming the Silences, p. 2).

In his autobiography, Hannah’s Child, he writes movingly of how all the time he was a Professor of Divinity in a series of American Universities, he was living with his wife’s deteriorating mental health, until he feared for the life of their son, Adam.

The ‘question’ of suffering was active and live for him.

At our Lent Course we watched a clip of an extended interview with Matthew Frost, CEO of Tearfund http://vimeo.com/18015230 in which he talks of the suffering across the Third World caused by human induced climate change.

This is not random suffering, or the fault of a God who doesn't care.

In fact he we are complicit in the suffering of the poor whose crops are adversely affected by unusual droughts and floods, because climate change is being exacerbated by human activity, which impacts the poor first.

He then spoke of personal suffering, in that he and his wife had twins with Down Syndrome, and his honesty about how challenging this was for all of the family is very compelling.

But his testimony to the grace and love of God in the heart of their family is also compelling.

So that’s suffering put in a real life context.

Your crops won’t grow because of things outside your control.

And babies are born with challenging conditions, or life threatening illnesses. Or they miscarry or are born dead, or die in infancy.

A friend with whom I trained has just taken the funeral of a nine year old boy in Telford, killed on a pedestrian crossing.

The question of suffering can never be just academic.

In our gospel today some people come to Jesus and tell him about a murderous act of evil that some Jews have suffered at Pilate's hands.

And somewhere else a Tower has apparently randomly fallen on a group of unsuspecting people.

Does this mean they were more deserving of judgement than others?

Did they deserve their suffering?

Jesus answers an emphatic NO.

Accidents do appear to be random.

But it’s how we live our lives in relation to Almighty God that’s the most important thing we can do, not how we try to avoid illness, accident or premature death.

The Jews who wandered in the desert wandered away from God and did reap what they sewed in the spiritual realm.

And we will too if we don’t live in fellowship with God, trusting in his mercy.

  3. And finally, what does the Cross of Christ say to the question of suffering?

It seems to me that the best ‘answer’ to the question of suffering, if we’re looking for one, is to point to the Cross.

Once again we’re indebted to the theologians on this one.

Jϋrgen Moltmann was an soldier in the German Army and in 1945 was taken prisoner in Belgium.

Horrified at what the Nazis had done in the death camps, he embraced faith and it was nurtured when he met Christians in a Scottish POW camp, where an American Chaplain gave him a copy of the New Testament.

He went on to become one of the greatest theologians of the modern era.

Moltmann, interviewed in Third Way recently

His book The Crucified God is a provocative title to begin with.

He suggests, and builds a whole theology around the fact that the crucifixion changes forever our understanding of God.

For centuries, theologians had held that God was impassive.

In other words, he was unchanged by the events of the world, by suffering.

This seems strange to us now, but to the ancients, God was God, and He was always unchanging and unchangeable.

Moltmann takes a long hard look at the dark side of the human condition (remember he had lived through war) and he centres it all around the cross, inside the heart of the Trinity – God gives Himself in Christ, for the life of the world, for our redemption.

God is forever the ‘Crucified God.’

Whatever you make of this, to point people to the Cross of Christ, to the suffering Saviour, is to say ‘God is not untouched by the suffering of the world – He knows all about it and has taken it into His very self'.

This means we know God is right there in our darkest moments.

As we gather to break bread and drink wine out poured we too partake in the death and resurrection of Jesus; we ask for grace to be identified with him in his passion.

There is no better way to embrace the purpose of God in our lives, than to take part in this acting out of his death and resurrection and what it means for us as we ponder Christ's call on our lives during Lent.