Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Sunday Church Services: The Bread, Roast, Cake or Icing of the Christian Life?

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File:St Andrews Church Oxford.jpg


I have been wondering about this.  About a year ago, we left a large Anglican Charismatic city centre church where we had been for six and a half years, and after a couple of months of checking out Oxford churches and Christian communities (oh, the tedium of it!!) settled on a very nice North Oxford evangelical church.
Now, geographically, it’s just a couple of miles away, but in human geography, it’s an exploration of England’s famous class system as one moves from a city centre church to North Oxford (which, for my non-Oxford readers, is distinguished by massive, hideously expensive houses occupied by successful academics, writers, journalists, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, venture capitalists and hedge fund traders who retreat here after a day in the City, and of course, many wannabes, mortgaged to the eyeballs, one pay cut away from financial disaster). I know the terrain well, because my girls have gone to private school in the centre of North Oxford for 7 years.
But, it’s not just geography; it’s style.  The Charismatic Church was a bit of circus; well, think of it as Crufts. Bounding golden retrievers, prancing poodles, adorable labradoodles, the odd pit bull terrier or rottweiler thrown in. The worship is loud. The word people use to describe it is “American.”
And the worship leaders, “Look-at-me, yeah-Aren’t-I-cool?” performers, with American names like Martyn or Lauryne scream the lyrics. Flashy videos and slick audio-visuals give you the church news. All very slick, hip. When I was new, an older lady and a younger one, gave me the same tip. Bow your head, press your fingers against your earlobes, and then the noise, oh sorry, music, subsides to quite a pleasant level. You see that gesture rather a lot.
But then, but then, and here’s why I stayed for six and a half years. Suddenly, the spirit descends. And Martyn and Lauryne belting out vacuous, vapid lyrics they’ve penned two days ago, somehow fade away, and the Rector and Parish Vicar and their wives, who, it’s rumoured, bitterly scheme and intrigue against each other like Medici church politicians or characters in Downton Abbey, and bound onto the stage with competing visions and revelations from the Lord, the vision du jour, all that blessedly fades away too, and the music fades, and suddenly, you see Him seated on the throne,
And the circus, the zoo atmosphere melds into the eternal menagerie
Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, saying:
   “To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
   be praise and honor and glory and power,
   for ever and ever!”
And you feel the spirit descend, and wash through you, and you are temporarily purified of all your snarkiness, and you are filled and you feel ecstatic.
Worship is the most selfless act there is. It’s not about us; we are totally lost in someone else. We reach the deepest peace in which the self sloughs off and flies away.
                                                   * * *
Well, then I started worshiping in North Oxford. Church here is sedate, refined and sophisticated. It does not feel like a cross between the circus and Crufts. It feels like… like… well, North Oxford!!
The worship leaders are low key, more about the music than themselves. They have normal English names like Phil and Pete. They don’t play repetitive, anemic lyrics they’ve written that week.   They draw from old wells, as well as new. It’s quiet, restrained, and, a word, many refugees from the Charismatic church to this solid evangelical church use  “has integrity.”
But though both churches are Evangelical Anglican, one wildly charismatic, one mildly charismatic, the differences in style are significant. 
Whereas the charismatic church used minimal liturgy, this is liturgical. Having grown up Catholic and been bored in church, a thousand times too often, I hate liturgy. In the charismatic church, the rector’s wife, who rather liked the sound of her own voice, would rush and gush over unending prayers, prophecies, proclamation, declaration, while the congregation grew restive. Here they were prewritten out and read out. How do you pray along with a prayer someone else has written? By the time, you’ve tuned your consciousness to pray for the Queen, they’ve gone through Cameron, Oxford and Missions.  
                                                * * *
Worship has rhythms much as making love does. Detaching from the world, entering into the presence of God, worshipping him. Changing from a bouncy, golden retriever style of worship to a more formal, stately style is proving harder than I imagined.
I am finding it surprisingly hard to sink into worship on Sundays. My most vivid church experience happens in small groups; I like and respect the people in my small groups, one a women’s group, one a couple’s, many of whom have quickly become my friends.  That’s where iron sharpens iron for me,
When I first became a Christian, and was church-shopping, an older Christian magisterially told me, “Find a church at which you can best worship God. Everything else is a fringe benefit.” I have up, till now, followed that advice.
But I now believe he was wrong. A Church is people. A community of people to love, invest in, grow with, grow into friendships with.
If you have been in a church for a while, and given of yourself, and served, and made no or few real friends, should you change churches? It’s a difficult question. I have twice changed churches for this very reason, that I wasn’t real friends with anyone (and, this is an indictment of me: there was no one whom I particularly wanted to be close, deep friends with!)
If you have little with common with the church community, community is harder to find. It may be time to try a fresh church. There is no sense in accepting mediocre, boring or bad situations. Odds are, it will be better. If not, you could always return!!
And so I have chosen my new church for the community, the people, rather than the worship services.
                                                                             * * *
We switch to the evening service, and I realize that more Sundays than not, I am skipping church. Sunday is a non-work, non-adrenaline day, when I suddenly realize that I have been running tired for a while. By 6 o‘clock, I am too tired, too sleepy, haven’t exercised, so feel the depression which exercise normally filters from my body. I wonder if exercise will make me feel happier that going to church. Or a nap. Or personal prayer.
I read and write intensely Monday to Friday. On Saturday, I read and write, but less intensely. And it’s so lovely then to truly, truly rest on Sunday, to not go anywhere, not even to church, which is 20 minutes away.
My husband and daughters go to church, but I stay home often, and pray and read scripture instead. For a few weeks, it works. I have amazing, refreshing, soul-shaking encounters with God, with clear guidance. I hear His voice. It’s praying where it itches, rather than listening to a sermon, hoping it connects with where you are. A targeted encounter like a one on one tutorial, rather than a lecture. It’s reading scripture and letting it speak to you, rather than listen to what Scripture said to someone else. Oh, and it’s perfect for an introvert!!
 Blog posts flow on Sundays while the family is at church. And they are good.
                                                                * * *
But then, I began to feel restless and distracted on those Sunday evening. Ha, that’s what Lewis said what the value of church attendance in Mere Christianity. A single stick fallen out of the fire will blaze brightly for a while, and then burn out. But many sticks together will together blaze brightly!
I am not modelling the value of church attendance (which I do believe in!) for my daughters.
 The thing about communal worship is that when you are bored, the music can lift you into a state of praise and worship far more effectively than you can lift yourself.
We all have poor spiritual peripheral vision. We focus on our current preoccupation, and the aspects of faith which have been most vivid and real to us that week. But there is always so much more about God which we haven’t realized or have forgotten. Going to church reminds us of them. The lyrics of hymns written by those who have experienced God more deeply, more lovingly, more devotedly, lift our tepid spirits.
Similarly, a good preacher can see amazing things which have evaded us in a text we have read dozens of times. Until I moved back to Oxford in my early forties, the preachers were always older than I. Increasingly, that is no longer the case. Sometimes, they were born, when I was in college. Ouch!! Just a little bit harder to take seriously. Just a little bit easier to get bored and restless during their sermons.  And listening intently: ah, a good training in grace and humility. Might as well start practising for the decades when all the preachers will be younger than I am.
Another reason to go is other people.  You both offer and receive social support, warmth and encouragement over coffee.
On Sunday, I feel that rest will be better than dragging my sluggish self to church, but then I land up writing often. On Monday, I am far more tired if I have not gone to church, and feel as I have cheated myself out of the day of rest I looked forward to. I do relax in church! In fact, it’s like going to the gym for me. I’d often rather not go, but then I feel so much better afterwards for having been. And in practice, I am less motivated and more tired on Mondays if I have written on Sundays, and end up taking a half day off.
I was getting a bit worried about how many Sundays I was blowing off church, when I was asked to co-lead my small group, from which I’ve been getting so many of the benefits of Christian community, love, encouragement, spurring on. I sighed with relief when I was asked to lead, as I knew it would solve my blowing off church struggles. I’d feel silly leading a group in a church whose Sunday services I don’t regularly attend.
  
So back to church. It’s still a bit sedate for me, compared to the bouncy Charismatic style I had got used to. Nobody belts out the lyrics, waves their hands in air, or dances! But, come on, if I truly believe prayer works, I could pray that it increases its bounciness quotient. I could even pray that on Sunday evening, in church!
* * *
Okay, to answer my question, is going to church on Sunday bread, Sunday roast, cake or icing to the Christian life.
To answer Anglicanly, it depends. For a new convert, bread or roast, I’d say. You only know as much of Christ as he has revealed to you. You need to go to church to absorb more of the concentrated theology in the liturgy (I don’t like liturgy, but that’s what its fans claim), to absorb concentrated theology in good hymns and worship songs, to learn scripture and its interpretations through the readings and sermons. Your faith seems less quixotic in a packed church.
But once you have been a Christian for a while, it’s a relationship. You will still love and rely on Jesus if you haven’t stepped into a church for a month. You will still need his strength and wisdom to get through the day. The church service is encouragement, refreshment, motivation, sweetness. A bit like Christmas cake with marzipan icing. You can do without it, but you and your life-blood are sweeter for the encounter with it.

The beautiful, broken, yet unbowed Church

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A friend of mine who is a social worker was telling me about a woman she worked with, a Kenyan, who had fled a physically abusive marriage to a safe house in Oxford. She had twins: a nine year old daughter, wheel-chair bound with cerebral palsy, and a son who had a physical or psychosomatic eating disorder, which made him grossly obese. The mother herself had continuous, splitting headaches with all the stress.

It transpired that the woman knew no one in the estate in which she was housed. “All she needs is a friend,” my friend said, almost in tears. “Just one friend. It’s not too much to ask, is it?”

But in a world, in which friendship has currency—“What do you have to offer me?—Are you cool, rich, clever, connected, highly-educated, beautiful, successful, lovely?”—what does this woman have to offer? Nothing.

She would have one need after another; anyone could see that immediately. I befriended a Zimbabawean, abandoned by her husband a year or so ago when she cleaned for me, and her needs were bottomless. I gave her my toaster, my computer (and upgraded), stuff from my house, stored her stuff after evictions (it’s still in my garage), got her other cleaning jobs, but there were more needs, and more.  She constantly wanted to borrow money (which I did not lend, because that just gets people even deeper into debt). Helping someone whose needs are unlimited is very tiring and draining–and thankless, but eventually one needs to draw the line, and sometimes the last No rankles more than all the previous Yeses. I understand why this desperate woman, who had so little to offer, could not find a single friend.

So is there hope for her? Where can she find kindness? Where can she find a friend?

I can only think of one place. The beautiful, broken, yet unbowed church of Jesus Christ.

A place where people talk to strangers. Where you can appeal to the Vicar, and if he can help or connect you, a good one will. Where there might be a safety net of ministries for such as her, or means to connect her to them. Where there are befriending ministries, and prayer ministries, where people will spend time with you and ask nothing in return.

I am pausing now to pray for this lady, whose name I do not know. She told my friend she did not go to church, unlike many from her nation. May she meet some on-fire African who might invite her to church.

“The local Church is the hope of the world,” Bill Hybels said, in an often-quoted epigram.

He’s right. Nowhere else can we relax so quickly, and so deeply with people so different from us.

Build your church, Lord Jesus.

Maranatha!

 

A Cloud of SERIOUSLY Flawed Witnesses

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I mean, like, SERIOUSLY.
David, who despite Michal, Abigail, et al, saw a beautiful woman bathe, and indulged his primal instincts, embarking on a slippery slope that led to murder, and bitter sibling rivalry.
Paul, who stood as a witness to the stoning of Stephen, who thought castration was the best thing for his theological opponents (Gal. 5:12)
Peter, who quite simply lied, and denied he knew Jesus, three times in a row.
James and even beloved ethereal John, who manoeuvred to be the greatest in the coming Kingdom.
Moses, the murderer.
And these are some of the rocks on which our faith is built.
* * *
I once belonged to a church which gradually turned toxic. I watched a saga of clergy bullying, intimidation, sadism, manipulation, exclusion, power-seeking and misuse and all the attendant pain. I was appalled.
* * *
I found it hard to pray that those people would be blessed. That would only  give them power to cause more pain to more people, and continue to build their own little Kingdom–which was theirs, not Christ’s.
 * * *
When Elijah was disgusted at Ahab’s behaviour, being a magnificent prophet, and not a wounded woman, he said grandly,  “As the LORD, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years.”
And well, there wasn’t.
And guess who lived in Israel? Elijah the Tishbite did.
No rain nor dew fell on him either! He lived in seclusion by the barren Kerith ravine.
* * *

What I most wanted for myself was “rain,” spirit-borne creativity, and unblocking of the wells.

And in the mysterious way of the spirit-realms, wishing drought on others would cause a barrenness and parching in my own spirit, and prevent me from being “like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail” (Isaiah 58:11). For with the measure we use, it will be measured to us. (Luke 6:38).

We cannot ask for rain and blessing on ourselves, while gently advising God to withhold it from others. Because blessing is God’s very nature. He makes the sun shine and the rain fall on good and evil alike.

And while God blesses whom he chooses to bless, and has mercy on whom he chooses to have mercy, a sweet heart draws down his ultimate blessing, which is his presence. Which according to the laws of physics, cannot fill a heart already full of bitterness or idolatry.
* * *

A grudge is like a tiny little cancer  in one’s spirit. It can grow and grow.
And what can neutralize this acid? These claws?
Drop by drop of the love of the Holy Spirit. The ocean of the Holy Spirit to drown the little Atlantis of bitterness.
*   * *

So just let it go—the injustices committed against us?
Yes, of course. “Just and true are all your ways,” the saints tell God in Revelation, and he will deal with those who hurt us with his unique combination of justice and mercy.
(Though when you see the wicked prosper, it takes faith to believe this!)
Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. It’s the most difficult thing that Jesus ever said, I think.
He advises us to BLESS those who have done us the most harm. Even people who have done wrong, perhaps evil things, and who might do it again, if given the power to.
·      * *
I finally found a way I could bless my enemies, and this gave me much joy.
If the ones who have ill-used you are Christians–or even they aren’t–the way they have treated you is not the whole story of their lives, or their characters.
They have most likely done many good things apart from the toxic conduct. which brought you grief.
In this case, in which I was unfairly and sadistically treated, I could happily ask God to bless them for the people who had received the Holy Spirit in a life-changing way through their prayers. For the healings they had brought about. For their ministry to the poor and to international visitors, which brought in no money. For their ministry which really blessed members of our family. For the prayers they had prayed aloud for me myself, which indeed were answered, amazingly and life-changingly; and the wisdom they had shared, which helped in me at difficult junctures of my life.
Ah, so that was how one could bless one’s enemies.
I stayed awake much of that night, and in delight, one by one, I blessed everyone I found hard to forgive, for all the good things they had done in their lives, quite apart from whatever I was struggling to forgive.
* * *
Back to the Scriptural great men of God. Is there a single one among that cloud of witnesses who has not at times messed up?  
Lolly Dunlap, a godly woman who mentored me, wife to the hyper-energetic John Dunlap,founder of schools, churches and Christian camps told me that she did not know anyone who has not looked back at his actions, and said, “I have really messed up there.” And she was the sister of Dick Woodward, the famous American Bible teacher, and the spiritual mother of Bill Warwick, Pastor of Williamsburg Community Chapel, and the real life mother of Don Dunlap, whom Dick called the most sinless human being he had ever known.
And so there is redemption. For the great scriptural cloud of witnesses, who have lied, murdered, committed adultery, betrayed the one they loved.
Peter, the most obviously flawed, the apostle most rebuked by Christ, also became the one the church was built on.  
And for us? I believe there is no sin (except, I suppose, the mysterious sin against the Holy Spirit) which disqualifies us for the race.
All sins and offences shall be forgiven men.  So matter how I have blown it, I can pick myself up, and continue following Jesus. As can my enemies and those I bitterly disapprove of.
Do not let shame paralyse you, no matter what you’ve done. Dust off those bruised knees, and get back into the race, jogging beside Jesus, your friend, right in there among that seriously flawed cloud of witnesses.

Nothing nicer than a spirit-filled church

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I have always thought that phrase was somewhat conceited.

My  church is by no means perfect, & neither am I, but it is, to use a glib, over-used phrase, definitely “spirit-filled.” I.e. one goes there, often empty, distracted, secular in one’s thinking, and yet slowly, mysteriously, one does encounter God there; get filled again with his spirit, his love, his energy, his inspiration, his will to do good & bless.

I leave smiling–from the inside out!!