Yeshua Explored

9th May 2022

Possibilities – part 1

(This series of articles was written a year after the first lockdown in March/April 2021)

Previous articles are still available on the Premier Christian radio website – https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Blogs2/Yeshua-Explored  – (until they finally pull the plug!)

What should the CHURCH have learned in the past 12 months?

This of course is a subjective list, as I am speaking only as someone who wrote a book about such things and who thinks that it could be interesting to assess performance against expectations. You may not agree with most of these (or even any of them), but they can at least be conversation starters. Where they take us next will depend on what we individually believe that God has been saying to His Church over the past year.

• That God is never caught out and always intentional

There’s a current theological movement called open theism, which basically teaches that, since God and man are free, God is not as all-knowing as we think and that He can be caught out by events, because of the myriad of branching possibilities. This opens up the possibility that COVID 19 crept in ‘under the divine radar’, rather than God having any input. This is plainly nonsense:

Who can speak and have it happen if the Lord has not decreed it? (Lamentations 3:37)

We hold fast to this familiar verse:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, whohave been called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)

The pandemic certainly falls into the category of “all things” and, whatever God’s intentions have been, the outcome for those who love Him … is a good one. It may not be without pain and it may require a theological reassessment, but the outcome is positive. This brings me neatly to my next point.

• That God may have been speaking to His people through COVID 19

This was one of the main points in Flockdown, written a long time before the virus had taken a real stranglehold. I had summarised it in the prologue of this book. Here’s a brief recap:

One effect of COVID-19 has been Flockdown, a compulsory separation of Christians from their places of worship. The thesis of this book is that it has been God’s Plan A all of the time, the possibility of a complete reboot, rather than a temporary time for reflection or awkwardness (or both). The heart of Plan A is not about the virus, or even the virtual world, it is the window of opportunity they have provided for a return to the original model.

This final sentence is to be emphasized. It is not about COVID-19 or ZOOM, these are peripheral factors, if we are to believe that God is speaking to us through this crisis. As I write this the government have given us a date when full normality is to be expected. To most people this will be a major relief and the days are being counted to that release from ‘the nightmare’. Yet, if we consider this as God’s Plan A to reform His Church, then we have a different narrative. Time is running out! Will Plan A have been implemented in time or will the moment be missed? I hope for the former, but I fear that we may experience the latter. This leads me on to the next point …

• That we may very well be in ‘last chance saloon’

By the time you read this, normality may have returned. It will have aspects of the ‘new normal’, so it won’t be actually ‘business as usual’. We have a reasonable idea of what the world will look like, a bruised and battered place with freedoms lessened and fear and uncertainty never far from the surface. But what of the Church? Will there be deep meaningful changes or just strips of elastoplast to patch things up? Will we have seen a revolution, as we saw at the 16^th Century Reformation, or will we have just seen a cosmetic superficial response in the sense, of, well we have learned a few things over the last year and we can make a tweak here and there, but we can’t see much further than that?

If it is the latter, then we may have missed out on something big and significant. And, if so, will we get another chance? Possibly, but God may need to be more insistent. COVID-19 may be a stroll through the dandelions by comparison. A tiny virus got our attention for a year without a lasting response, what does God need to do to really get the Churches attention? It took a Babylonian exile to show the Old Testament Jews that all was not well with their relationship with God. The established Church may have signed its own death warrant here!

• That the Church ought to have had a clearer voice during the crisis

In “Into the Lion’s Den” I spoke of the authority we need to have in Jesus.

Encourage and rebuke with all authority (Titus 2:15)

Here’s what I said: The world needs to see us as people with authority, but not as they understand it. This is not the authority of social status, corporate power, celebrity or wealth, but an authority from above. How is this manifested? That’s the 64 million dollar question because there’s no easy answer, because we rarely see it exercised. There may have been glimpses of it in earlier times with Martyn Lloyd Jones (even the atheist Joan Bakewell was in awe of him in a TV interview from the 1960s that is available on YouTube), Mary Whitehouse (respected from afar, though the liberal media never acknowledged it at the time) and Mother Teresa. The only person who comes to mind currently is Canon Andrew White, who presents himself as a real person but with a faith that compelled him to work in war zones, despite the disability of multiple sclerosis.

We have more authority than we dare to believe. We don’t represent a lobby group, or special interests, or a ‘victim group’. We are representatives of the King of the Universe. So why don’t we speak with the confidence that ought to give us, knowing full well that Holy Spirit is just waiting to give us the right words? We need to make the first step. It may require much courage, because it will be ‘going against the flow’, but without this initial gesture we are failing in our Divine mandate. Someone needs to tell it as it is. This brings us to the next point …

• That we have missed a chance to demonstrate spiritual realities

There have been many revivals in history. They have all been divinely orchestrated, but they have also been a partnership between God and willing prayerful and humble disciples. Peggy and Christine Smith, one blind, the other crippled, were sisters in their 80s living in the Hebrides in the 1950s. God used their persistent prayers to bring in a great revival. He also used the evangelist, Duncan Campbell, who was quoted as saying: There is a growing conviction everywhere, and especially among thoughtful people, that unless revival comes, other forces will take the field, that will sink us still deeper into the mire of humanism and materialism.

Where are the praying women, quietly meeting in back rooms without fuss and bluster? We have read of many a corporate prayer initiative, broadcast to the Christian community through blogs and promotional videos. This, to me, smacks of worldliness.

But our God is, was and will always be … the God of small things. He doesn’t respond primarily to our plans and initiatives (whatever we may think), instead He works with the smallest of the small, the Gideons among us, or the ragtag band of non-entities who rocked the world in the first century. He initiates, He carries out His purposes, in His own way, in His own time. We look at our current situation, with a world of little long-term hope, with people wrestled away from their plans and ambitions and what do we do? We pray for God to act. But when He doesn’t, then what do we do? Are we poleaxed into inaction, or do we wait? I have seen a lot of action and a lot of inaction. The action has tended to be corporate posturing, huge Zoom gatherings of prayer warriors and intercessors, streamed to thousands and full of pleas and requests for Divine intervention. But what has been more telling … has been the inaction.

We are called to be transformed into the likeness of Jesus. We are his representatives. What would he have been doing in the last year? Would he have Zoomed his message from the confines of quarantine … or would he have been in the streets? He dealt openly with lepers, a community in permanent lockdown, yet he wasn’t bound by the conventions, however sensible the precautions may have been. He would have used every opportunity to spread comfort, help and healing to individuals. Should we have been doing similar, as ambassadors of the Divine promises? We would have possibly fallen foul of the secular regulations. We would have possibly openly defied our rulers (Romans 13:1-2), yet surely compassion and mercy trumps all? Were we too willing to comply with the media messages, too willing not to take a chance for God’s kingdom? We complained enough times about being excluded from our places of worship, yet how many of us complained about not being able to fulfil our expressions of worship, our ministry to a hurting world?

Did we do our very best for God during ‘the year of Covid-19’?

This is an extract from the book, Flockdown Church: Back to the drawing board?, available for £5 at https://www.sppublishing.com/flockdown-church-278-p.asp