Reggie McNeal on missional church

My Spiritual Journey (2)

So I got to 1976 and my discovering that all the time I’d been chasing after God, he’d been chasing me and now I was caught. Some people have dramatic conversion stories, mine almost passed me by. I didn’t realise what I’d done until I was talking with some other guys at college and they could see that I was changed.

Very quickly I became a challenging member of my Christian subculture. I wasn’t about to conform to some imposed pattern that made me just like every other well-behaved member of the small group. I was, and still am, a little bit of a maverick. So I asked awkward questions and sought out deeper conversations.

In 1977, six months after coming to faith, I found myself in Germany at the European Congress on Disciple-making, run by the Navigators. I still have great admiration for this interdenominational organisation. I soaked up a lot of ideas over the few days we were there and it was at that conference that I first felt the gentle nudge of God’s Spirit to enter the bigger picture of God’s plan and purposes in the world. I didn’t know what it would mean, but I wanted to be part of whatever he was doing.

The following year I found myself in a 17-seat minibus travelling through North Africa with 15 other people. It was a trip organised by British Mission, later to become World Horizons. Two significant things happened on that trip. One, I got nudged more clearly by the Spirit to think about full-time ministry in the context of the UK church. Second, I finally connected meaningfully with the woman I would marry! Anne never could tell right from left and that left her at a disadvantage when trying to cross the road in Casablanca. I seized the opportunity and took her hand. We married two years later, which makes this year our 30th wedding anniversary.

Coming back from Africa we wrote to a number of colleges to enquire about possible training. BBI (Birmingham Bible Institute) very wisely encouraged us to find jobs, settle into being married and learn about life outside of the cloistered world of university and education. So we did. For seven years I worked for British Gas in R&D until I finally entered college to study theology.

During those years the call grew and I grew in fits and starts as I struggled to work out my faith amidst the questions and challenges of a church that generally wasn’t working. That’s not a criticism of any of the churches with whom we connected, but just a general feeling of unease that things were not as they should be and that all was not well among God’s people. Neither is it a precursor to my prescription for fixing anything. Even after 20 years of ministry I still haven’t worked that out.

In college I found out that my paternal grandfather had spent some of his life as a missionary in Gambia, and I began to wonder if I was part of a bigger story even within my own family.
College was great and it gave me the chance to explore things in new ways. One of those things was the place of the church in God’s mission. Something I tried to wrestle with in an essay.

More of that next time.

A Contrast Society

In Roxburgh and Boren’s Introducing the Missional Church, they talk about the need for the church to become a contrast society. The church is called to be a sign, witness, and foretaste of God’s dream (p103) for the redemption of all creation. To be this foretaste we must become a people shaped by an alternative story, living by a set of distinctly Christian practices. (103) How each individual church does this will reflect its local community. In other words there is no one size fits all plan, but a pattern of principles that Roxburgh and Boren divide into three sets of missional practices–presence, love and engaging the neighbourhood.

It’s interesting to me that one of the things they pick up on is the practice of hospitality, something that’s recently caught my attention because I was asked to preach about it!
One of the interesting questions then is to ask ourselves what would a contrast society or community look like in my neighbourhood. Before Christmas, sometime in October now I think about it, we did a little experiment in hospitality. We invited our neighbours three either side and five or six opposite to come and meet us. We’d only been in the house for a month or so, and just wanted to get to know them.

Some came, more didn’t. Why was that? Maybe they thought we were the religious nuts that had just moved in and it wasn’t worth the risk of not being able to escape. Maybe they were actually as busy as they said they were. Bt at least we asked, and we will ask again. This is part of being a contrast society in our neck of the woods.

The more I think about being a contrast society, the more it seems to call me to live faith out in full view of others. Not preaching at every opportunity, but of sharing a different life, shaped by a different story, the story of God’s redemptive plan at work in my life.

In the warmer weather I hope we can begin to extend our hospitality through being outside more often than we’re inside. Spending time in the park simply doing life with others, playing games, sharing picnics, hearing stories.

There’s bound to be more to being a contrast society than this, but at least it’s a place to start.

My Spiritual Journey (1)

I thought I might write about my spiritual journey, not because it's particularly exciting or even inspiring. It's just my story and it might help me understand me a bit more.

To find a starting point for one's spiritual journey is always difficult. How far back do you go? For me I suppose I'd have to start with the day I decided not to go to Sunday School. My parents were not church goers, but we were sent to Sunday School. After two weeks I declared it to be boring and that it wasn't for me. Little did I know at the tender age of 4 that I would spend the larger part of my life serving the very institution I appeared to be rejecting that day. Perhaps even then the established church was not a great fit for me!

I also remember asking, at one family meal, why I had to believe in God. Because the adults told me so simply didn't satisfy my young mind, and so at 4 years of age I was already asking deep questions that were getting me into trouble.

I don't remember much about the next 10 years or so. I know that by the time I was 15 or so my questions had become more focused on life's meaning. More specifically about who could give meaning to my life, who had the authority to do that. Existential philosophy appeared to suggest that you do the truth thing for yourself, but that didn't satisfy me.

As I travelled to and from school one thing always caught my eye, an illuminate cross on a church. At the time I didn't understand why or what it represented. It wasn't until I arrived at University that I found someone who helped me understand how to begin a relationship with God.

So there I was, sitting in my room on the last Sunday of the first term in 1976 asking God to do for me what I needed. To forgive me and to give meaning to my life.

Questions, then, have always been a major part of my mental tapestry. Sometimes I ask too many questions, and that paralyses action. Sometimes the questions are a launching point for deeper study and learning. I still ask questions, and for some people I still ask too many as I try to understand what it means to know God and make him known.

In conversation, in the pub

I had my first outing to a local pub the other evening. It was very quiet and I'd arranged to meet someone there for a chat. This is pastoral care, this is conversation, this is just being church, this is just being. For those who might be worrying, I had fruit juice. Actually, as I told my conversation partner, I decided when I was 18 that it was okay not to like beer and to tell other people I didn't like it! So I drink what I like and I like fruit juice.

Back to the story.

The place we went was not busy. Maybe because it was Monday night, maybe because it as cold, or maybe it just isn't busy on Mondays! So we met and we sat and we talked. We talked about all sorts of things. Nothing we talked about was a secret, it didn't need to be said behind the closed doors of an office or study. It was just two people doing life together.

I'm not about to suggest that we convene a small group and all turn up with Bibles next week, but why don't we meet and have conversations more often than we do? Why is it that we find it so hard to spend time together when one of the hallmarks of community is time spent together?

We had a great meal with friends from church the other Friday. I laughed so much at one particular story that I thought I was going to turn inside out! Isn't it time we invited our neighbours and friends into our lives more often? To share our stories with them and hear their stories from them. No evangelistic agenda, just doing life. Could we possibly reimagine church more in the contexts of these relationship than in the context of filling a building once a week?

A few weeks ago someone said to me that they thought the problem with our building is that it was designed to be closed most of the time! Reimagining it to be open most of the time might be a good place to start, but it's not the only shift in imagination we need. More needs to change. Stud walls and paint, extensions and new buildings won't make us more engaged with our community.

If we can't see what God is doing in the space we share with the missing, it's unlikely that we'll fix that without a new imagination. I wonder if there's room for a housegroup for people who don't like housegroups and that doesn't meet in a house?

I think I'm rambling again!

Dealing with confusion

Life can be confusing to say the very least. Just when you think it's going really well, something pops up and send you into a tailspin and just when you think the world is about to crash in on your head, God steps in and does something quite remarkable. It is all very confusing at times.

At the moment it has to be said that life is a little disorienting. nothing that can't be handled if approached properly, and by that I mean with bags of grace and prayer and by keeping jerking knees under strict control!

And so it is that I turn to by daily reading and Blackaby's devotional guide. Here's an extract from today's reflection from Luke's gospel:

God reads the heart and knows the honest pursuit of His will by His children. Jesus drew near to these men [the two on the Emmaus road], walked with them, and opened their minds to what the Scriptures said about Him and about the events of their day. As Jesus was speaking, their hearts burned within them! As they listened to Jesus relate the Scriptures to what they were experiencing, they knew in their hearts that they were hearing God’s truth. Their doubts vanished, excitement overcame them, and they raced back to share the truth with their friends!

If you become bewildered by circumstances in your life, Jesus can reorient you to Himself through the Scriptures just as He did for these two men. From your human perspective, the situation may be confusing and discouraging. It takes the presence of Christ to open your eyes to the truth of the Scriptures. Have your circumstances confused you? You need Jesus to give you His perspective. Once you’ve heard from Him, you’ll be like these two men, excited to join God in what He is doing around you and eager to include others in the experience.

So, if life is a little confusing you know where to turn. Don't turn to the self-help guides, turn to the Bible and walk in the ways of God. It will do wonders for your soul. Trust me, I'm a pastor!

Real Church

Brad Brisco at Missisonal Church Network has posted a great quote from Henri Nouwen. Go read it!

Thinking about Church

A couple of things I've read recently are helping me think about church. The first is from Bill Hybels book Axiom. It's about DNA, but the point that stirred my thoughts was the need to discover a church's DNA and plot the course to a new DNA carefully. As we face the challenge of change, we need to be careful about identifying the DNA of what is ahead of us and about how we become DNA carriers amongst the leadership team and the wider church.

And then I was reading Ed Stetzer's blog and was reminded that fundamental to the church is the call to conversion. This is part of our DNA. The gospel changes lives. It doesn't replace one set of principles with another, it doesn't overlay an extra set of faith values or offer an alternative lifestyle.

The gospel calls for a radical loss of self in order to discover our truest identity. We die to live. We take up our cross every day, we lose our lives to find them. This is not a gospel of self-realisation but a gospel of self-denial. I am not the centre of the universe.

Putting the two together means that if the transforming power of the gospel and a strong expectation of seeing lives transformed, souls saved or won, however you want to phrase it, is not part of the DNa then whatever is formed by that DNA will not be the church. This is not at odds with a desire to see a new expression of biblical community.

Preface it with what you like: attractional, missional, traditional, contemporary, emergent, it doesn't matter, it won't be the church. The church is God's chosen vehicle for his missionary activity in the world. Take that away and you've taken the heart out of the church.

Pastoral Care Training Day

On Saturday I had the great pleasure of spending the day with some great folk from ARC. You can find out more about the church from their website. I met Peter, the senior pastor, at a one-day seminar last March. We began to talk and from there we developed a relationship that led to me leading a training day for them. We talked about pastoral care.

The day broke down into four sessions: An overview; the health-check; how we listen; and developing good practice. The health-check is a simple questionnaire used to identify areas of personal spiritual growth and ministry. We covered a lot of ground, but it was a lot of fun. The group was wonderfully responsive and made me feel wonderfully welcome. And the food was brilliant!

I ended the day shattered but having been inspired and challenged. Surely that's not a bad outcome, to be challenged by your own seminar!

Having not done anything quite like this before, it was a opportunity for me to explore how to plan and deliver something that would stimulate and keep people engaged through a whole day. We did some group activities, but we probably needed more process time. To do that would mean either cutting down the content or lengthening the day. I think we probably got the balance about right.

Missional Church Video

This came via one of the regular feeds I check.

Hospitality and witness-the notes

Here are an edited version of my notes for my talk about hospitality as witness.

If there is any concept worth restoring to its original depth and evocative potential, it is the concept of hospitality.

Henri Nouwen

Does hospitality have a part to play in the witness of the church? Well the short answer is yes, but of course it rather depends upon what you mean by witness and what you mean by hospitality, and just for good measure what you mean by church! In the Ancient world hospitality was assumed and expected. If you turned up in a strange town or village, someone would offer hospitality.

Being so much more sophisticated, we’ve turned hospitality into a business, a marketing opportunity, a degree-level qualification. We offer hospitality on the basis of a return. Not so for our ancient predecessors.

Paul urged fellow Christians to welcome one another, because it was the right thing to do. It honoured Christ and the cause of Christ.

Hospitality was a qualification for leadership (1Tim.3)

Hebrews says welcome strangers... you might be entertaining angels unawares

Jesus: when you did it for the least of these...

Rom 12:13 Practice hospitality

1Pet 4:0 Offer hospitality without grumbling

In Luke's post-resurrection account of the Emmaus road, Jesus is revealed as the risen Christ in the context of hospitality and food. And while the link to hospitality and witness seems rather tenuous at best, there is something about his self-revelation in the practice of eating that at the very least hints at how important eating together can be for a full expression of relationship.

And it’s not the only time. Breakfast on the beach, eating with them during the 40 days between resurrection and ascension according to Acts 1. And we should not forget his words in Revelation 3: Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone will open the door, I will come and eat with them.

If the Son of God himself thinks it is important to eat with his followers, even after his death and resurrection, what role does it play for us?

Hospitality and witness

#1 It Includes

Jesus offered a welcome to strangers. He said: Come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy loads. Come, find rest for your souls. Hospitality can be a sign of the welcome of the kingdom.

#2 It identifies

Jesus ate with folk that religious people wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. Because of it he became known as “a friend of sinners”.

#3 It celebrates

When Zacchaeus responds to the gospel, Jesus invites himself to dinner to celebrate the event.

#4 It exposes

When Jesus has dinner with a Pharisee his lack of courtesy is exposed. Simon disapproves of the woman who washes the feet of Jesus with her teats, but he won’t even offer water for the job. It’s beneath him.

#5 It challenges

When there is no one to wash the feet of the disciples, Jesus does it himself.

#6 It encourages

The early church met together in homes around meals. They ate together with glad and sincere hearts (Acts 2). This was part of the larger picture of the life of the early church that resulted in mission and growth. In fact almost everything the early church did produced growth. The outpouring of God’s Spirit, the gathering of the early community, the signs and wonders, the early persecution and arrest precipitated a prayer for boldness that resulted in growth. The problem with the Greek widows, the death of Stephen and the scattering that followed, the Spirit inspired boundary-breaking visit of Peter the Jew to Cornelius the Gentile, the conversion of Saul, the planting of the fist Gentile church, the missionary journeys, the argument between Barnabas and Paul, and most amazing of all, a church meeting even resulted in mission.

Conclusion

Does hospitality have a place in the life and witness of the church? Yes it does. Do we practice it often enough? Probably not.

There is so much more to explore around this idea of the hospitality of the kingdom. Even as I presented these ideas there were questions running around my brain. But it is a starting point for more thinking and discussing. Read Wiggy's comment on the other post to see how they are exploring community and hospitality and witness in the summer. All very exciting.

Hospitality and witness

Recently I was asked to preach at the local Churches Together service for Christian Unity. I was given the title and passage for the talk, it was from Luke's Emmaus Road narrative and the topic was "Hospitality as witness."

Now I have to confess that at first sight the only connection with hospitality I could see was that Jesus ate some fish, and the particular text about opening their minds didn't seem to fit the theme too well either. So I began to wonder where hospitality fitted in the kingdom and in God's mission too. Slowly things began to surface as I read through the gospels and thought about Jesus and food.

In the end I must say that my talk was far from the finished article. So many questions were still unanswered in my own mind that I could only present half a survey if that. But there's something here that has caught my imagination. From what I've heard, it caught a few other imaginations too.

Jesus offers an invitation to come, there is hospitality in the kingdom, there is hospitality in that very invitation. Hospitality is an invitation to share personal space and a giving away of time and attention. I have this other phrase wandering around my head too: Sacred spaces in public places.

Somewhere here is an idea about inviting people far from God to share our sacred space on their turf. In the parks and cafes, restaurants and galleries, shopping malls and sports fields.

It's all very fuzzy, but I'd be interested in some comments and thoughts about the whole idea. I think I'll post my notes from the talk too.

Suffering

I don't like to suffer. I don't even like to think about suffering. I certainly don't equate some of the things through which I have to go with anything I see on the news in places like Haiti or Afghanistan.

But I do suffer. Suffer in all sorts of ways, physically, emotionally, spiritually. Just like you suffer too.

How then should we respond? How should we understand what's happening to us?

I was reading Henry Blackaby's devotional yesterday and it was all about the role of suffering. He contends that there are somethings that God wants to build into your life that he can only do through the process of suffering. Personally, I know that suffering is the only route to patience and many times to grace.

There is a positive aspect to suffering. We all endure suffering to some degree, but the good news is that through it we can become like Jesus. Are you willing to pay whatever price is necessary in order to become like Christ? There are some things that God can build into your life only through suffering. Even Jesus, the sinless Son of God, was complete only after He had endured the suffering His Father had set before Him. Once He had suffered, He was the complete, mature, and perfect Savior through whom an entire world could find salvation.

But it's that little phrase, tucked away in this paragraph that gets me and drags me to my knees with more questions about me and spiritual character than it does about the causes and effects of any suffering through which I walk.

Are you willing to pay whatever price is necessary in order to become like Christ?

Am I that willing? Fortunately we live life one step at a time. The measure of our suffering is rarely revealed to us ahead of time, although often afterwards we can see the hand of God preparing us before the suffering comes.

Let's give Blackaby's devotional the last word:

Don’t resent the suffering God allows in your life. Don’t make all your decisions and invest everything you have into avoiding hardship. God did not spare His own Son. How can we expect Him to spare us? Learn obedience even when it hurts!

Phil. 4:4-7

I needed to write a short reflection on these verses from Philippians for a funeral service I'm taking later today. This is always a challenge, to try and say in two minutes what you might take 35 minutes to say any other time. I guess the nature and place of preaching is a subject that will rumble on and on as long as we continue to do it.

Anyway, here's my simple reflection on these great words from Paul:

Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi is written while the apostle is under arrest. He doesn’t know what the future holds for him, it could be a time of great anxiety. It isn’t that Paul isn’t prone to worry. He cares deeply for the churches across the whole region. He is anxious about his own people, the Jews. He’s concerned about the faithfulness of the emerging network of followers of Jesus Christ. Paul is not unfamiliar with the stresses and strains of life that can cause us to become anxious about anything and everything.

But he has a simple prescription to put it all in its proper context.

He’s already told his readers that they shine like stars, that they must “press on” in life and that even prisoners chains cannot hold back the progress of the kingdom. As he pleads with two members of the community who are at odds with each other to agree and as he enlists the help of the faith community to support them, he calls them to respond with worship.

In the Bible worship is always a valid response, whatever the circumstances. Whether pressure, hardship, unrest, loss or even death, worship is something we should always do. And not only worship but also pray. Pray about it all. Tell God what is on your heart and on your mind. Hold nothing back, because he wants to know and he cares enough to listen and is powerful enough to answer. Not always as we think he should, but always he answers.

So, Paul’s antidote to a life of anxiety is simple: Always rejoice, pray about everything, don’t let you mind wander to the bad stuff.

After our reading finishes, Paul’s very next challenge to the church is to focus on the good stuff. The noble stuff, the pure stuff, the lovely and admirable. If it’s worthy of praise, think about it says Paul. Don’t dwell on the negative, rest in the positive.

Rejoice always, pray about everything, focus on the good stuff.

This is not a recipe for a good life, it’s the recipe for life in God’s hands. A life in which anxiety and worry find their proper place.

Would I go there?

Several times recently I've been asked if I would be comfortable going to the pub. It's an interesting question. I've never really been much of a pub-goer. Even in my youthful days when it was all the rage, I never really felt at home in the cultural setting of the lounge of the "Dog and Duck".

The thing is, I don't really have what you might call a pub memory. Now I don't mean that I've forgotten any and every visit. Just last year when Anne and I were waking in the Dales we had a really nice lunch in a typical country pub, and I remember that clearly!!

What I mean by a pub memory is a cultural background. I literally don't know how to behave in those surroundings. Do I sit down or stand at the bar. Do I talk about philosophy or football? What's the etiquette for getting attention when I want to buy a drink? Do I take my used glass or ask for a clean one?

While church should always remain attractive, simply being attractive is not going to change anything much for all those people who do not have a church memory or even a Christian memory. For those people I'd be guessing that as far as they are generally concerned, church does things for church people.

Perhaps if we began to explore how we can help people with no Christian memory discover how to relate to God where they are, we might begin to help them form a memory that will move them towards a deeper relationship with him.

I wonder what that kind of church might look like.

Just wondering

Perhaps the reason I sometimes feel like we're missing the point as we try to figure what being church means in our present context is because we're looking for a new definition when we should be looking for a new imagination.

As Roxburgh and Boren suggest we need a radical transformation of our way of viewing the world if we're going to reimagine the church effectively.

Introducing the Missional Church

Having put down Francis Chan's Crazy Love, I've picked up Introducing the Missional Church by Alan Roxburgh and Scott Boren. Having read the introduction and the first chapter, my head is pounding with thoughts and ideas and memories about why I care so much about the local church.

I care because I honestly believe that there is so much more to being the church than we have discovered or than we practice at this present time. Too often the church is reduced to something machine-like that we maintain and fix. My preferred picture is of a garden we nurture and that surprises us as it grows and flourishes. When something unusual happens with a machine it usually means trouble. Something is breaking down, normality is being interrupted and we must fix it. When something unusual happens in the garden it's often eventful, interesting, and new. It may not need fixing at all. I wonder, for example, if it were just by chance that someone discovered that some plants produce different coloured flowers if they are planted in different types of soil.

When I was at college in my final year of a theology degree, I wrote a paper about reconnecting the church to its mission. As my tutor pointed out, I wrote a lot, but neither of us was sure I'd answered the question I was actually asking. I do remember though how much it meant to me then to try and rediscover the heart of what it means to be the church. I am still asking the questions twenty years on.

What I do know is that I can never settle for anything less than a wholehearted search for God's heart for the church he loves. If all our assumptions must be shattered and all our boundaries broken, then so be it if it releases the church from an internal focus on filling building towards an external focus on releasing the kingdom into communities.

Maybe one day I'll have some answers worth writing down. Perhaps there might even be a PhD in it! Who knows, who cares as long as we get a ste closer to being the church Jesus wants us to be.

Crazy Love

I've just finished reading Francis Chan's Crazy Love. It's a very accessible read but far from easy. The challenge is clear from the outset:

This book is written for those who want more Jesus. It is for those who are bored with what American Christianity has offers. It is for those who don't want to plateau, those who would rather die before their convictions do.

The book is written against the background of a simple question: Has the present-day church missed the point? We've become comfortable, complacent, even conventional about faith. But the Jesus of the New Testament calls us to radical, redefined living through which he wants to change the world.

As Francis Chan points out:

The world needs Christians who don't tolerate the complacency of their own lives.

Will you enjoy reading it? Well, that all depends on how you define enjoy. It should stir your heart and your mind to consider how seriously you take following Jesus Christ as a fully devoted disciple.

Taking control of the chaos again!

It feels good to have taken a little time to reorder my tickler file. Organisation is one of the wagons from which I fall regularly. These days I find it easier to get back on because the basics of my system are fundamentally sound. There are some things to file, but most of the sorting out is done and I now need to remind myself every day to check the file and act on what I find.

I may have blogged about my filing system. Essentially it's an alphabetical system with a drawer for church things, a drawer for home stuff and a drawer that still needs attention! It used to be six drawers, so getting it down to three was quite an achievement in the first place.

I'm planning that 2010 will see some more progress in my improving organisation, and that I'll start tracking things more effectively. The single most important thing for me is getting stuff written down and ordered into actionable tasks. I use Omnifocus, but a simple list is really all I need most of the time.

So, here's to a better organised 2010! Now all I have to do is set some achievable goals in all the other areas of my life!

Responding to Haiti

I read with a mixture of incredulity and embarrassment that a prominent evangelical was telling viewers to his TV show that Haiti had brought this disaster upon themselves.

Perhaps I'm more embarrassed for God, who is being so misrepresented by such a perspective. I don't know.

This morning, as I continue preparations for Sunday, I stood in front of a flip chart and wrote down:

What does the Gospel offer the people of Haiti?

This is the rough outline of my thoughts.

Firstly is does not offer judgement or self-help solutions. It doesn't theorise or theologise about the circumstances. It just gets stuck in and does something.

It offers faith, hope and love.

Love, because an earthquake does not mean that God has stopped loving Haitian people. Love, because loving one another both inside and outside the church is a cornerstone of what it means to be human, made in the image of a loving God.

It offers hope because whilst we can't stop earthquakes from happening, they do not define who we are and they do not define our Haitian brother and sisters. They remain people dearly loved by God and made in his image, just as we are. Death, destruction, poverty, homelessness might describe them at the moment but they do not define them.

It offers faith. Faith that there is a bigger picture, an eternal context for the suffering and loss happening all around us. We live in a fallen world, we cannot escape the truth that sin brings judgement, but that's not the whole story. While we may live in a fallen world, even a judged world, we experience grace in bucketfuls. We see grace as people are pulled from the carnage alive long after the rescuers ever expected to find anything but bodies. I'm sure that over the coming weeks we will hear stories of amazing escapes and incredible survival. We see grace in the financial and practical responses of nations. Grace will abound.

The gospel also offers compassion as people respond with gifts and time and energy and expertise. And it offers compassion as Jesus weeps at the graveside of his friend Lazarus and over the city of Jerusalem. If you think God remains unmoved by tragedy then you are very much mistaken.

If I were preparing this as a sermon to preach, and I may choose to drop my prepared talk for Sunday and reflect on these things instead, then I'd want to finish with a question:

How can we be kingdom people to the people of Haiti?

Three things come to mind.

We can pray. We should already be praying, but we can always pray. We can pray for the grieving, the hungry, the injured, the survivors, the aid workers, those who would look to use the situation to their advantage, all sorts of people need our prayers at this time.

Secondly we can give. Through organisations we know or directly through the Disaster Emergency Committee. It really doesn't matter through whom you give, it matters that you give.

Thirdly we can go. Some may have skills they can offer, some may just have a heart to offer. I don't know what opportunities may or may not exist now or in the near future, but it's worth a prayer isn't it? "God, if I can do something practical, show me what it is, open a door for me to become involved." Next to "Go" on my flipchart I wrote "Habit for Humanity". I was just wondering if later, after the immediate relief work is done, whether they might be involved in some rebuilding work. I can swing a hammer reasonably well. You never know and you should never exclude the possibility that God might call you to be the answer to the prayer you are praying.

So there we go. It's not fully thought through, it's just my response at this moment in time. It's not eloquent, it won't be read by more than a handful of people, it won't be nationally syndicated. But I don't care about that at all. I do care about the people of Haiti who need God's mercy not our judgement.