I heard a trailer for a TV program recently asking the question “Should we be worried when people in power who have religious beliefs allow those beliefs to affect their decisions?” What a ridiculous question. A person who does not allow their beliefs to affect their decision making is behaving irrationally. Of course their are some decisions on which your religious beliefs have little or no bearing (“what colour socks shall I wear today?”). But wherever ethics are involved, your beliefs provide the underlying moral framework that enables you to make decisions based on what is “the right thing to do”.

The idea that somehow people with a religious faith should somehow be able to leave it at home when they step out of the door each day is becoming more and more prevalent. The other day, a French polititian announced on the radio that religion is just for “the private part of our lives” and other people shouldn’t need to know what we believe. This was his main justification for the current ban on Muslim headscarves in French schools.

It seems to me highly arrogant that atheists should think that their own voice is the only one that can legitmately be heard in the public square. It is presented almost as the “default” view, or the lowest common denominator, when it patently is neither. The notion of a church – state divide is now being pressed to mean a complete silence from the church on all matters to do with politics.

To require people to deny their own epistemic base in favour of one they do not believe in is asking them to commit intellectual suicide. Of course, we will all have to learn how to debate with people who have a different worldview to our own. We may also need to develop arguments that rest on common ground between those worldviews, or that can be made sense of even by those who do not share our faith. But to simply pretend that God does not exist when we are in public, is to deny a fundamental part of our own identity. If we truly want to live in harmony in a multi-cultural society, this means giving people the freedom to express their opinions, not forcing them to hide them. Only this will lead to respectful disagreement, rather than bigoted misunderstanding of one anothers points of view.

Ironically, the very people most eager to shut up religious voices they disagree with are those who repudiate censorship in all other forms. They insist that film-makers should be free to show whatever sexually explicit or violent material they wish, and allow audiences to “make up their own minds”. Similarly, homosexuals are encouraged to “be themselves”, and be “proud of who they are” – no more hiding in the closet, but accepted into mainstream society. Yet this generosity is not extended to Christians and people of other faiths, who are being pushed back into their closets and asked to pretend to be irreligious just in case they offend the atheists. Maybe homophobia is on its way out, but fidephobia is certainly on its way in.

Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the latest in the series on cell groups but I do have some information on what happened. Thanks to my recent research in the area of oral tradition in peasant cultures, I have been able to distill from my wife’s report what actually happened, minus the hagiographical embellishments.

Wendy started the meeting with the icebreaker question “which leader do you most admire?”. It was obvious that the truly spiritual people would answer with a Biblical character. However, those that did shunned the obvious choices, opting for Old Testament characters with dubious track records. Esther’s revenge, David’s polygamy and Nehemiah’s beating people up and pulling their hair out (Neh 13:25) were considered worthy of emulating by Maresah, Catherine and Steve respectively.

After the worship, there was supposed to be a discussion, but unfortunately a dispute arose as to who was the greatest. Unbelievable considering that Jesus rebuked his own disciples for such an unworthy topic of conversation. Steve Heinz ably demonstrated his own claim for supremacy with a dazzling display of Scripture quotations. He was in fact the only person in the room who could correctly recite the list of Kings of Israel, along with their lengths of reign and size of harem. Not that he needed this evidence, for he endeavours only to perform works of charity when people are watching (the more the better).

Graham helpfully provided the mnemonic OXJKLG, which stood for something beginning with O. Perhaps it works for Graham, but Steph’s short term memory is not much more than a goldfish’s. She didn’t fare much better with Steve’s ABCDE – was it something about Cream Doughnut Eating?

I’ve achieved something of a milestone this week. At Stoneleigh Bible Week in 1999 Terry Virgo recommended two books: The NICNT Commentary on Philippians by Gordon Fee, and Jesus and the Victory of God by N T Wright. I bought Philippians first and that took me over a year to read. Last summer I bought Jesus and the Victory of God. Both were outstanding books, but there is one problem: they have dreadful front covers.

Now I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover – but these books look boring. If by any chance you are a theological book cover designer please take note. Not everyone appreciates ancient religious art. I’m embarrassed to have these books on my desk at work when I’m reading through them.

I could give many examples of awesome books that have dreadful covers. Here I will show the worst three offenders. I don’t mind if a bad book has a bad cover – but these are really worth reading.

1. Jesus and the Victory of God – N T Wright

N T Wright paints a historically credible picture of Jesus – unlike this painter:

2. NICNT Philippians – Gordon Fee

I have no idea what is supposed to be happening here:

3. Let the Nations be Glad – John Piper

This challenging and life changing book just looks cheap and cheerful:

Last week my three year old son Ben brought home a model of a house built on a rock that he made in Sunday school. It was a nice idea, with two blocks of foam to make the house and roof stuck to a stone with some glue. Unfortunately, this house wasn’t quite as robust as the one in the story, as the glue hadn’t set yet so the house kept sliding off the rock. (we caught his younger sister Lily licking the glue off the rock later, but that’s another story).

Now I’m willing to overlook as artistic license the use of a pitched roof rather than a more historically correct flat roof. But there is another misunderstanding that seems to be more widespread. And that is to do with where exactly the wise man built his house. It’s time to set the record straight. The wise man built his house on the sand, right next door to the foolish man.

I can hear you quoting Mat 7:24 to me already – “a wise man who built his house on a rock”. But if you look in Luke 6:48 we see that what he actually did was “dug deep and laid the foundation on the rock”. It would be very unusual for someone to build their house directly upon a bare piece of rock (the floor would be rather cold for starters). Incidentally, here we see an example of two accounts of the same story in different words. We don’t generally have verbatim quotes from Jesus, but summaries of what he said. In fact, he probably told this story many times in different places, and quite likely he was speaking Aramaic rather than the Greek which the gospels were written in.

So my reconstruction of the story goes like this:

Two men were building houses, a wise man and a foolish man. They built next door to each other on the sand. The foolish man didn’t bother to dig foundations. He built his house directly on top of the sand and it didn’t take too long to build. He even had some spare cash left over at the end to get Sky Sports and broadband. The wise man kept digging till he hit rock and laid foundations on top of that. His house took longer to build and cost more. He would have to wait until next year before he could afford to decorate.

Then one day there was a storm. The rain fell and the wind blew, and a nearby river burst its banks. The water came into the foolish man’s house underneath the walls and it started to sink and then collapsed. The wise man just needed to put some sand bags in front of his door. His house easily withstood the storm. He sat watching out the window drinking a cup of tea, wondering whether he should go outside and offer some help to his next door neighbour.

Update: If you would like to hear a short sermon on this passage (Matt 7:24-27) I preached in August 2006, click here.

Well, I’ve just got back from the second meeting on how to run a cell group. Clearly Heinz is doing something right as we had two extra people (although it remains to be seen whether that growth rate is sustainable).

Jane Bramley got the meeting going asking us what our hopes and dreams were. It was a very revealing time with Wendy Ditto admitting to wanting to own a racehorse, and Rebekah Champion expressed her wish to become a car designer while Daryl travelled the world. Steve wanted to get into the Guiness Book of Records by holding 100 consecutive cell group meetings.

Graham Bramley made creative use of background noises to help us enter into our time of worship. Trains, cockerels, children crying and whale mating noises emanated from different parts of the room leaving us with a sense of eager expectancy for what might be coming next.

Later it was time do discuss how well we were getting on with our witness. Steve, marched round his friend’s house seven times and was about to blow his trumpet when he realised he had forgotten his handbag. Better luck next week. Neil’s friend is now travelling in disguise on the bus. Graham’s friend has taken two months holiday. Simon didn’t manage to hug a friend, but Wendy’s “give a pint of blood a day” technique looks promising even if it didn’t get off to a good start.

So what were we doing wrong? Steve Heinz explained that the key activities are “Sewing, Reading & Knitting”. We weren’t to worry if we didn’t immediately get on to knitting. It takes time to improve at sewing.

Maressah closed the meeting by explaining her technique of imprecatory gingerbread man eating. Rather than getting angry with someone you don’t like, imagine you are eating them slowly. She didn’t disclose who exactly she had in mind, but she did eat quite a few.

I have written four new articles over the last couple of weeks, which are available now on my website in PDF format.

Rather be Wronged (1 Cor 6:1-8)
Every Member Ministry (1 Cor 12:14-26)
Qualified to Teach (Ezra 7:10)
Tabitha Arise (Acts 9:36-42)

Four more will hopefully be on the way soon

Hopefully you didn’t see the dreadful “Did Jesus Die?” documentary on BBC4 recently. They basically set out to show that the Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus is unfounded and presented the theory that he survived the cross and went to live in India as an alternative. The accusation was that the church was trying to force people to believe the unbelievable by refusing to allow anyone to ask questions.

So if the church are so anti-intellectual, perhaps this program could present the evidence in a fair-minded and unbiased manner. Apparently not. Only one person who actually believed in the resurrection – Tom Wright – was even interviewed, and despite his great learning on the subject, his contribution to the entire program amounted to not much more than 20 seconds. More disturbing was the way that facts were twisted or even left out, in the knowledge that your average viewer would not know the Bible well enough to realise what was going on.

So the main example given for contradictions in the gospels was “Did Jesus feed 5000 with 5 loaves and 2 fish or did he feed 4000 with 7 loaves?”. But what we are not told is that in fact the feeding of the 5000 with 5 loaves and 2 fish is in all four gospels. Mark tells us that there was a then second miracle (feeding 4000) and even describes a conversation between Jesus and the disciples discussing the differences between the two miracles. So there is in fact no contradiction at all, just speculation that only one incident actually occured.

When presenting evidence that Jesus might have survived the cross they decided to simply leave out one of the most obvious objections – the spear thrust into Jesus’ side. Much mileage is got out of the fact that we have lost the original ending to Mark’s gospel, and this is used to imply that the claims of the resurrection only started appearing 300 years after Jesus’ crucifixion. No mention whatsoever is made of 1 Corinthians 15, which is dated much earlier than any of the gospels by even the most liberal scholars. Mark’s gospel in fact does end with an empty tomb and when you combine this with the repeated prophecies of Jesus that he would die and rise again on the third day, you can hardly believe that the original ending of Mark didn’t include a resurrection story. If Mark didn’t believe in the resurrection, what exactly is the point of his book?

Now to be fair, historians have a right to be cautious about accepting ancient accounts as “gospel truth” without thoroughly checking them. But Richard Denton, the program writer, while remaining deeply suspicious of anything in the gospel accounts, seems ready to believe absolutely anything else. Much later sources are quoted as undeniable facts to overthrow the unreliable gospel records, which were by any account written no more than a generation after the events. Completely unfounded ideas such as Jesus marrying Mary Magdelene and having children are presented as good history.

The whole “Jesus went to India” theory was well presented but again addressed absolutely none of the main objections that might be raised. In fact, a good number of the experts they interviewed would have been able to refute the idea, even though they did not themselves believe in the resurrection. Jesus was thoroughly Jewish in his thoughts and teaching. The similarities with Buddha’s teaching were hardly persuasive. They both warned of a judgement and against the love of money. The third piece of evidence was that both are claimed to have walked on water. But if we are to go with the documentory’s anti-supernatural stance, then these stories are myths anyway so I can’t see how it could possibly help the case for a visit to India.

Finally, Peter Stanford, the main interviewee (who came across as someone who resented his religious upbringing and was relishing the chance to get his own back) claimed that to think Jesus rose from the dead is to miss the whole point of Christianity. For him, the resurrection is about death – something that we all face, and even though Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, the myth of his ressurection in some way helps us all. Well Peter, I’m sorry but you’ve missed the whole point of Christianity. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, as Paul said in 1 Cor 15, your faith is futile, and we are to be pitied more than all men.

Ultimately the proof of the resurrection is not likely to come from historical research, but a personal encounter with the risen Christ. This is what happened to Paul, the early apostles, and millions of Christians since. Of course, not many have seen him physically, but he promised that when he went back to heaven he would send the Holy Spirit. I know from personal experience that the Holy Spirit has definitely come, so that’s good enough evidence for me that Jesus is now in heaven safe and well.

Here is the first in a new series on how to run a cell group. Steve Heinz, the world famous cell leader, has got together a group of people to show them how it ought to be done. I went to the first of these model meetings earlier tonight, and can now share with you what I learned.

You need to first appreciate the core values that every cell should espouse:
1. Warmer – through meeting only in houses with central heating and double glazing
2. Broader – through cream cake eating
3. Further – through cell group cruises to the Caribbean

To make sure these values are met, he introduced us to the famous 4 H’s meeting plan:

1. Hello
Make everyone feel welcome and involved by asking a question. Heinz offered this suggestion for a first meeting: “Who in this room, apart from your spouse, would you most like to kiss?”. Obviously, as the group get to know each other more, you can ask questions of a more personal nature.

2. Hallelujah
Steve demonstrated that the time of worship does not need to mean singing songs. Prophetic break-dancing and yodelling in tongues are two practical examples of ways you can bring freshness to this part of the meeting.

3. Homiletics
In this postmodern day and age, we can’t expect people to all find the same truth in a given Bible passage. Steve suggested that everyone shut their eyes, write a word on a post-it note, and then collected them in to see if they could be arranged into a sentence that meant something. Our words didn’t quite make a sentence, but everyone felt good that their contribution had been included.

4. Heralding
Cells are supposed to grow numerically, and for that you need new people. Having babies is unfortunately not quick enough as you are supposed to split into two new groups every two years. Simon Ditto told us about his “hug a stranger a day” plan, which will hopefully lead to him making some new friends.