Mobile Phones in Church!

Okay I've taken this off Rev. Bosco Peters who runs the wonderful liturgy blog 
which I am pleased to report is back online after the earthquake that shook Christchurch in New Zealand. He took it from the PCA but well it's a good video and I thought you all might enjoy it.

Infernal Choirs

Today I got roped into the choir. I'm still mesmerised by how it all happened. There I was praying before the service began when a tap came on my shoulder. It was an elderly gentleman asking if I could help him with something after the service. Of course I replied with a yes and offered any assistance I could with whatever it was he needed. So after a rather dramatic service (someone collapsed) I hastily headed off to see what it was I could do for the gentleman when ZOOM! In came a handshake from the left... WHAM! Another one from the right and then a flurry of quick-fire phrases like “Oh this is the new man in the choir!” and “Oh it's great to have a new tenor”.

It was a choir practice and I had been lured in to the trap.

Apparently the old man along with another had noticed me singing during the Psalms (shocking I know) and had decided that I was to be a new member of the choir – my opinion on the matter didn't matter.

So what could I do? Run around denouncing choirs as Roman Catholic idolatry, storm out and maybe while on the way smash the keyboard for being a “devil's kist of whistles” - just for good measure? Of course not, I simply smiled and said hello to one and all whilst the John Knox in my head cried a little whimper.

“Do you know how to read sheet music?” asked the lady on the keyboard. “Well in my old church we didn't use any instruments so I have a little knowledge of using it” I replied. To which I got the following response uttered in the most amazing way “ Oh well in our church we like music”. Now that blew me away. In my old church the regulative principle of worship was all encompassing and rather than destroy the music or worship I found it actually aided it. It wasn't there because we didn't like music but rather because we wanted to praise God in ways we knew He wanted to be praised. It was all about Him rather than us.

In the Covenanter’s worship everybody sang. There were no instruments to aid the singing (or cover up a lack of it) and no choir was needed because the congregation all sang with gusto! If they didn't then there would have been a deafening silence.

In my current church hardly anyone sings. The general feeling is that it's the choir's job to do that. I was always taught to reflect upon the words of the Psalms and then sing them while allowing God to show me the power of those words. Some parts are to be shouted in joy, others cried out in anguish and other Psalms are designed to make us reflect upon God's glory and majesty. This it would seem was my downfall. By being seen to sing I was drafted to choir work. Yes me the once staunch defender of exclusive Psalmody and the regulative principle of worship who decried the inclusion of choirs as unnecessary will now be performing in one.

Since Dad had his haemorrhage a few months back the Church has been a real freedom. Yeah I’m in all the loyal orders but all they bring me is disappointment and headaches. While most men are out one night a month (if even) at meetings I'm out most days, travelling all over the country sorting out potential political minefields because somebody wants a tricolour tore down or wants the name of the district changed from South Derry to Londonderry because the “other side calls it Derry” (totally ignoring the point that most of “our side” refer to it as Derry as well).

I try to spend as much time with dad as possible and take his mind of things. He worked as a joiner since he was 16 up until a month or two ago when he took a brain haemorrhage that left him disabled. He has recovered greatly over time but it still gets him down in the dumps. Then the rest of my time is taken up with my girlfriend who is really wonderful and had started attending church with me (she is a communicant Presbyterian) but is refusing to if I am in the choir as she doesn't want to sit alone.

Also in the background I have a good friend who is getting out of prison now after doing 2 years but yet another old friend is likely facing a prison sentence after some pipe bombs and ammunition were found in a forest next to Portglenone forest a week or so ago.

The point is I have lots of things on my mind and church gives me time to forget about my troubles and re-focus on God. I go in and sit in silence praying for 10 minutes or so and then reflect on the words of the day's psalms. Then I praise God during the service and then I go home ready for the week ahead... refreshed and renewed and ready for a closer walk with God and the communion of saints. Church is like a spiritual detox and allows me to learn more about God whilst letting go of worries and regrets but I’m worried that I can’t do that any more. I just can't picture myself sitting facing the entire congregation (all bar one or two are strangers to me) whilst praying (and in doing so looking like some pious show-off). I also find it profoundly disrespectful to sit facing away from the minister and I don't see the purpose of singing in a choir... I’m not good enough for it anyway but most of all I'm just not called to it. If anything I'm worried everyone will be staring at me wondering who on earth I am and by taking their focus from God during worship I'll be causing them to sin.

So what on earth do I do?

Lenten Reflections and Ramblings

This is the first year I have experienced lent. For years I would have denounced it as idolatry but yet this year I am (for want of a better word) celebrating lent.

I like the idea of lent. A time of self imposed denial when we reflect upon our lives in Christ and reflect upon His suffering so that we can come closer to Him.

I have given up meat for lent and go for long walks where I listen to a Christian audio book (C.S. Lewis's “Screwtape letters” seemed apt, though of course I have a dramatized version of the NIV too) on my mp3 player where I just allow myself to drift away surrounded by the beauty of God's creation. Then after a little while I turn it off and just walk in silence and allow God time to speak.

I had started a Theology course almost a year ago with Spurgeon's College and had studied Biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, pastoral theology and New Testament Greek and I loved it. There was something wonderful about reading God's Word in the original languages and then being able to both understand and explain it to others. I had wanted to be a minister... a preacher and had since I was young.

I genuinely believed that God was calling me to preach and a part of me still believes that I am called to preach. The call is quieter than it used to be but it's still there, somewhere. That belief in a calling explains this blog – and why my posts are the length of sermons!! I also run a facebook page where I just put my short thoughts (really!!) and observations about Christian living and little verses of Scripture alongside Christian news reports and other such tid-bits about faith and I'm pleased to say that the page now reaches over 500 people daily. I run that page anonymously but it's still a wonderful feeling (if boastful) to know that you are reaching young people all over the world daily with Christ's glorious Gospel.

This blog though not even a month old is also wonderful. It is an amazing feeling to speak to Christians like Matt in Southern California, Ricky in Prague, Julian in Sheffield or even those closer to home like Rob in Londonderry or Sammy in Antrim. All of you are always in my prayers.

Thank you for your support and comments!

Due to financial problems (I'll explain more in a later post), even though I was awarded a grant by the Grand Royal Arch Purple Chapter of Ireland towards my education I was forced to gave up my course and with it any hope of entering the ministry (I can't afford a university education) in the future because I don't meet the educational requirements and can't afford to meet them.

But I continue on. Learning about faith in a solitary fashion. At present I am teaching my self Latin (at the minute I'm at the “Roma in Italia est” stage) so keep me in your prayers that'll I'll stick at it.

Time has changed a lot of things. Most of my childhood friends and neighbours have moved to pastures green in Belfast city or England or even Scotland and Upperlands – my home village - can be a lonely place at times. I myself dabbled with moving to Canada for a while or maybe Scotland but I don't believe we can run from our problems. Plus Canada is too cold and Scotland too wet for a man used to the tropical climate of Northern Ireland.

If anything all this change and suffering over this past year followed by reflection has brought me closer to God and better equipped to see the blessings in my life. I hope Lenten suffering has the same effect but I won't know for sure until Easter week.

We all bear our own crosses and have our own problems so here's a a final comforting thought from Calvin that has helped me greatly:

“You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy”

Big Bishop Is Watching Over You

 Well I've been an Anglican for a little while now but yet I’m still struggling with the idea of Bishops.

There seems to be a real obsession amongst Anglicanism with bishops and this obsession doesn't seem to be anything new. Anglicans come from such a diverse spectrum, with some of us coming from High church backgrounds and others low, some of us support homosexuality and others don't, some of us are liberals, others evangelicals and some are even Anglo Catholics. But yet everyone seems to be completely preoccupied with the bishop. In my old pre-anglican days bishops were presented as some sort of bossy boots figure who did very little except lord it over those further down the food chain. However, now I'm in a church that has bishops I see they are more akin to ecclesiastical celebrities. After all even the most docile and dozy of congregations bounce back to life when they hear “the bishop is coming!”

The religion of the New Testament - by which I mean small groups of Christians walking to together in the faith in equality and working together like a family - doesn't really have much of a part in the Church of Ireland today. This seems to suit the episcopacy since from what I can see bishops only really arrived on the scene a century or two after Christ. But you and I have arrived almost two thousand years after Christ and sometimes this time difference can seem like a momentous obstacle for a Christian... after all how am I meant to get to know someone who lived two thousand years ago? This is where the Bishop is meant to come in. If Christ seems remote to some of us at least we have the Bishop. A man succeeded from the Apostles who learned directly from Christ. Who better to help me and oversee my learning about Christ than a man directly succeeded from those whom Christ directly taught? A man who's job description is summed up in a single Greek word: “episkope” - the power to oversee.

If Big Brother is watching you.

Then Big Bishop is watching over you.

Of course we aren't the only church with bishops. Others hold to the idea that bishops (rather than being men in big hats who are to look after a group of Christians in a specific area) are in fact men who have a supernaturally guided line of direct communication with the apostles which is transmitted by the laying of hands. The idea is that Peter and co. being Apostles held special gifts (everyone agrees with this) because they were Christ's disciples. They then made bishops and gave them some of their gifts. These bishops did the same to new bishops and so this method of receiving and then passing on the gifts carried on down the centuries until the bishops of this very day. Hence the Bishop of today is a direct link with the Apostles themselves.

This idea of Apostolic succession is a kind of divine Ouija board where a part of an Apostle is present in your local bishop... it is also a silly basis for any authority in the church. The idea that Joe Boggs over thereis somehow better than you or I because a Bishop put two hands on his head is crazy to me. Silly though it seems it is still the only real reason bishops should have any power at all within the church. Women bishops, male bishops or even homosexual bishops don't really matter when you realise that the office itself is pretty much meaningless in the modern church.

Greek and Russian Orthodox, Egyptian Copts, Armenians, German Lutherans, American Methodists, and Roman Catholics: all have bishops. And the office's antiquity can seem persuasive. Christianity may seem to be moving at an alarming pace towards the cliff and the ubiquity of the bishop is something to hang on to in challenging and changing times.

Truthfully though, we don't need a lot of the bishops we have because what they actually do is venerate consultants rather than the saints. They run from county to county in order to attend seminars and conferences but yet they have very little to do in the day to day running of parishes. They have very little interaction in the lives of the Christian laity, instead choosing to visit once every so often and maybe send a letter once or twice a year to let the church know what some community worker or government official has said.

My problem with bishops and indeed the reason I feel they are fast losing any sort of purpose is because of the modern church's absolute surrender to every social pressure group. Which when added to the fear of entering any sort of dispute about the faith leaves us pretty weak. It's not that we don't need bishops because in truth the opposite is true... the problem is that we don't need a lot of the bishops we have. We need people who are going to stand up for the faith, people who aren't afraid to offend people with the Scriptures and most of all people who have a faith in Anglicanism and who are prepared to go out and tell people how good the Church of Ireland is and why people should come to our churches. We need to find people like that sooner rather than later!

Office of the Keys

When looking at some of the historic reformed confessions I was struck by one particular question and answer in the Heidelberg Catechism that really jumped out at me.

"Q83 - What is the Office of the Keys?

A83 - The preaching of the Holy Gospel and Christian discipline; by these two the kingdom of heaven is opened to believers and shut against unbelievers."

It got me thinking about Church discipline. A topic that is often pushed to the side and ignored in our modern churches. No one wants to mention it because often people fear that such discipline entails other Christians snooping on their private business and then outing their private sins to others in the church. Plus we often worry about appearing judgemental towards others. If snooping like a gang of private detectives is what biblical church discipline entails, then we all would be understandably worried. Fortunately though, this is not the case.

One example where church discipline is applied in the New Testament is in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Paul describes a situation where a member of the church has taken “his father’s wife.” Paul seems shocked that someone could do such a thing saying “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans” (1 Cor. 5:1). Not only was this man’s behaviour breaking Biblical commandments, but it was even shunned among the pagans. Paul’s remedy for this was to excommunicate this man: “You are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord” (v. 5).

The man's sin was was scandalous, and ruining the reputation of the church and he needed discipline. Discipline is like cancer surgery. The disease must be removed before it sickens the whole body. Notice that we aren't told the man’s name (or the woman’s for that matter). After all, it's not about shaming people or embarrassing them in public. Indeed, Paul holds out the hope that this action on the part of the church will lead to this man’s restoration and salvation on the day of the Lord. Removing the man from the church was done so that he might think about the gravity of his sin and ultimately repent of it.

In the interest of maintaining the peace and doctrinal purity of the church in dangerous times, the Heidelberg Catechism's 83rd question and answer rightly connects the practice and necessity of church discipline to Jesus’ instruction to the disciples about the keys of the kingdom.

We all know story of the keys of Heaven (in Matthew 16:18-19) when Christ said “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven”. As the Heidelberg Catechism points out, the preaching of Christ and Him crucified is the divinely-appointed means through which the kingdom of heaven is opened to all those who respond to that message with faith and repentance.

But the church’s “binding” function — through which the entrance to the kingdom is closed — is connected to those who reject the message of the gospel when it is given to them, because they remain bound in sin. This binding (shutting) is also connected to church discipline. Those who profess faith in Christ, but who do as the man in Corinth was doing, have the door to the kingdom of heaven closed to them through the means of church discipline.

In those tragic cases where the church must make the determination that someone’s conduct and refusal to repent raises serious questions about his commitment to Christ, the church must shut the door of the kingdom to him, with the goal of that person’s eventual repentance and restoration.

As tough as it is, church discipline is commanded by Paul, and the procedure to be used is given us by Jesus (Matthew 18:15–20). Through the preaching of the gospel, the church opens the kingdom to all who believe. But for those who reject the gospel, and who insist upon behaving in such a way as to bring scandal to Christ’s church, the door to the kingdom is closed. Maybe it's time we brought discipline back to the Church?