Petley’s superb White Fury gives voice to a view that British historians have tended to see slavery primarily in terms of its abolition.
The Holy Spirit and the Church
The Holy Spirit is the one who ushers in the Kingdom of God. That Kingdom is present, although often hidden, in the church.
Welcome Home
A blog post by Revd Azariah France-Williams.
A Warm Welcome?
There is a myth that black West Indians were invited by the U.K government after WW2 to help rebuild the shattered British landscape. In fact, the government was not willing to have members of the Islands come over. They sent emissaries to the Islands to in effect declare:
“England is not open for business, thank you for your interest, we do not need your help.”
The problem was Islands like Nevis had incredibly high literacy rate coupled with easy access to English newspapers. The classifieds were clear, England was bleeding and needed labour to staunch the flow of blood. So although the government did not want the black presence, the businesses did.
One of the travellers over that period was a nineteen year old girl from Nevis who boarded an Italian boat called the Lucania. The sea spray flecked her cheeks as she boarded British passport in hand in 1955. That young bright-eyed teenager was the woman who would become my mother. She came to bring her strength and her love as a full citizen, with full rights, bringing her full self. But it can be hard to bring your gift and feel like you are merely tolerated. She worked as a seamstress and would sit on the long bench in front of her sewing machine at Hepworths factory in Leeds. Her white colleagues had a game where they would all shuffle down the bench until she toppled off the edge of the bench. White supremacy can not accommodate anyone that is ‘other’ and will strive to reestablish a world where the ‘other’ is on the floor. Although she was treated badly, she determined to make others feel welcome driven by her faith and love.
There is a Peters and Lee song called ‘Welcome Home’ the lyrics are warm and melodic, causing one to sway and smile whatever mood you were in before listening. School was not easy for me for a range of reasons. Whenever I arrived home from school, I would spot the net curtains twitch and I would know what to expect. Upon entering the house the ‘Welcome Home’ song would be blaring out at top volume and my mother would take my hand and pull me into the hallway, and dance with me. After I got over the embarrassment I would sway along and join in with the singing. We would laugh, and settle into the rest of the afternoon.
Mum welcomed me in the place she received no welcome. U.K stood for UnKind.
To some extent my mother came to the U.K to find some purpose and identity. As a ten-year old, when the second world war had finished, she wanted to now be a part of the ongoing rebuilding enterprise. She was coming to the mother country for affirmation and validation. It was a big journey with companions along the way and the thought was always that she would head back to Nevis, head home after she had done her bit, seen the world, and saved up some money to cultivate her patch of land, return and settle down. Because we all know there’s no place like home.
There is no place like home.
In the movie the Wizard of Oz Dorothy and her ragtag crew of three friends and Toto seek him out to receive the gifts he is presumed to be able to offer. Dorothy’s dog Toto pulls back the curtain and then they met the wimp behind the wizard. He shuffles from behind a curtain and the game is up.
A biblical hero with his three friends on a journey is Daniel. The story here is that they survive their own tornado and are taken to the land of power and oppression. The sheer scale and magnitude cowed many of the stolen into capitulation to the new power. They had their names changed and the emperor, the Wizard demanded they saw the world he did.
He set up a huge statue to himself and demanded everyone gathered to worship, and bow down to this oppressive display of power, but Dorothy and her three friends, I mean Daniel and his companions, would not bow down seeing the fragility behind the projection of power.
‘There is no place like home.’ Daniel and his friends bring a sense of home with them. They connected to the God of their ancestors and even in a strange land they stood despite the risks. In my book Ghost Ship, I am attempting to stay standing, I am holding onto the edge of the bench, the Church of England has rejected her children from other lands. Well eventually Dorothy got back home, and Daniel’s descendants returned, but now identity was hybridised. Home would have to be reimagined all over again. My mother never made it home but made herself a home to so many.
God knows black lives matter, God is unambiguous about that love. When our doorbell rings and someone different to us turns up at our door, in our nation, at our church can we dust off the record player and play ‘Welcome Home,’ they may be tired, and one day it may be you needing to push the doorbell hoping to hear the music.
‘in as much as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me’
Come and Study With Us
Our study of theology means engaging with a Kingdom that is powerful and transformational.
We offer programmes in ‘Kingdom Theology’ because at the heart of our study is the belief that Jesus came proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom of God. Through his life, death, and resurrection, he has brought the reality of the Kingdom to this world.
Find out more about WTC Programmes HERE.
Praise as Defiance in the Face of Suffering and Death
However, praise as a form of defiance is not just about declarations of hope. It is also about resisting the powers.
Charismatic Christians, Crisis, and Coronavirus: Part III
This is the third post in the series on Charismatic Christians, Crisis, and Coronavirus. For part one of this series go HERE. For part two of this series go HERE.
What Happened to 2,000 Years?
I love history and wish I had studied more of it in my life. I’m a bit shocked, if I’m honest, at how little history we all know, how little general history and how little Christian history. I remember one of my professors (a Roman Catholic) at King’s College saying that Charismatics and Pentecostals concertinaed time because we look back to the Bible and then map it straight on to today as if there was nothing in between. It’s so true. It means that now, Charismatics are looking to the Bible to make sense of what’s happening, and the results of trying to find guidance for this specific time can be a stretch. What would help us would be to speak to our historians who will provide us with some valuable resources from history that are much more specific to our situation because Christians have lived through plagues before. For a really good example of this see Bruce Hindmarsh’s post on the history of the church and plagues here.
One example that struck me is from Cyprian of Carthage (c.200-258 AD). He himself was martyred, but in the years before he was executed, also endured a plague. He writes about this in one of his Treatises (Treatise 7) on the question of mortality. In this piece of writing to the church, he encourages Christians to see their lives in the perspective of eternity and all that lies before us. For it is immortality ‘that is our peace, that our faithful tranquillity, that our steadfast, and abiding, and perpetual security.’ (§3)
Just like Christians today, many were clearly disturbed that being in Christ didn’t afford them any special physical protection from the disease. ‘But nevertheless it disturbs some that the power of this Disease attacks our people equally with the heathens, as if the Christian believed for this purpose, that he might have the enjoyment of the world and this life free from the contact of ills; and not as one who undergoes all adverse things here and is reserved for future joy.’ Famine, war, rain, drought, shipwreck make no distinction. ‘…and the disease of the eyes, and the attack of fevers, and the feebleness of all the limbs is common to us with others, so long as this common flesh of ours is borne by us in the world.’ (§8)
What is more important, according to Cyprian, is how we behave now. Some Christians like to claim that disasters are God’s judgement on the earth for the folly of humanity. In this treatise, Cyprian is saying that the judgement that falls on the human race is how the sickness and trial exposes our true motives. We are judged by how we respond. He writes this, ‘And further, beloved brethren, what is it, what a great thing is it, how pertinent, how necessary, that pestilence and plague which seems horrible and deadly, searches out the righteousness of each one, and examines the minds of the human race, to see whether they who are in health tend the sick; whether relations affectionately love their kindred; whether masters pity their languishing servants; whether physicians do not forsake the beseeching patients; whether the fierce suppress their violence; whether the rapacious can quench the ever insatiable ardour of their raging avarice even by the fear of death; whether the haughty bend their neck; whether the wicked soften their boldness; whether, when their dear ones perish, the rich, even then bestow anything, and give, when they are to die without heirs.’ (§16)
Apparently, doctors would flee the plague, relatives would dump their kin out of their houses even before they had died, and the rich would leave the cities for the country. Christians, on the other hand, have been known at many times throughout history for being highly sacrificial, tending the sick, and caring for the vulnerable, many becoming sick themselves. It is very sobering to think that this is what healthcare workers are doing all around the globe at this very moment, many of them while they wait for the correct equipment and having to make do with protective equipment that places them at risk. We are deeply indebted to them. I pray daily for the equipment to reach them and for proper testing. Nobody should have to take unnecessary risks, and I’m not advocating that Christians rush in to treat Corona victims! But we can be seen to be behaving out of a spirit of generosity and trust. How is this situation searching out the righteousness of each one? If we have two toilet rolls and our neighbour has none, we should give one away. Aren’t we the people who believe that God will give us our daily bread? I read a poignant article by an Italian novelist in Rome who wrote this about her experience of lockdown, ‘The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises.’[1]
Christian Leadership in a Time of Crisis
We want our world leaders to take control and to find solutions to this massive problem. We want them to save lives, to act wisely and quickly, to put structures in place that will save future generations from making the same mistakes as we have done. We also want this for our Christian leaders. We need wisdom and comfort, faithful and wise decisions, and protection from making mistakes that will wound the next generation. The key thing now is that we don’t sell a false comfort or mislead people in their expectations so that they are then either bitterly disappointed, completely worn out, or forced into denial. I would recommend reading a recent blog post by James McGrath on “What Does the Bible Say about Coronavirus?” for a reminder of the dangers of false promises in the face of hardship. If we do this, as he says, we run the risk of ‘making a serious crisis worse by adding, on top of the illness itself, a long-term negative effect on your own faith and that of others.’ [2]
The Lord is My Salvation
Our faith and our scriptures teach us that real safety, security, and certainty can only be found in a relationship with the living God through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, we are promised that these things are our spiritual inheritance, the riches given to our inner beings, our minds, and hearts, and souls, but not necessarily evident in our circumstances and the world around us. When we search the scriptures for comfort, we find that God promises to be our shelter, our rock, and our fortress. He will never leave us or forsake us. He alone is our salvation. We can also find scriptures that promise us that he’ll shelter us under the shadow of his wing, and that nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate us from the love of God in Christ. But we will be hard-pressed to find scriptures that promise us we won’t have trouble and hardship in our lives or that we won’t find ourselves in the midst of them. When everything in our world is shaking, he is our ever-present help in the midst of trouble (Ps 46:1).
The reality is that human life is precarious and unstable. The world can be a beautiful and a dangerous place and nothing in it belongs to us to hold on to forever, not even our own lives. This has always been true for every human being that has ever lived. It’s only when the reality sinks in that we cry out in protest because in our inmost beings; we don’t want it to be true. But the Christian faith gives the deepest answer to that cry of pain and fear at the uncertainties of life. Christians, along with non-Christians, get caught up in the cataclysmic events of history as well as the everyday struggles and challenges of life. There is no difference in the conditions of existence. The difference is supposed to be where we find our sure and certain hope, and the most important hope that we have by far is that this is not the only life. This is not the only world. Jesus came to offer a far, far better world to come in which God will wipe away every tear from our eyes and there will be no more death, no more plagues and disease, no mourning or crying or pain, for the first things will have passed away (Rev. 21:3-5). This is the hope we have that no one and nothing can take away from us. God’s love poured out into the world through Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit is precisely so that death won’t have the last word, but that it will be the beginning of a beautiful, new, whole, free, forgiven, life. That’s the wonderfully good news.
And The Creation Is Still Good…
I led the staff devotions the week we went into lockdown and I’ll admit it was a challenge to lead our first staff devotions together since the world had changed so suddenly all around us. I deliberated for a long time on which passage I wanted us to look at together. In the end I chose Genesis 1:26-2:3. I chose it for what it tells us about God, what it tells us about us, and what it tells us about creation. It tells us that the world is in his hands because it is his, he made it, and he is watching over us. We belong to him and he is the author of life. It tells us that when he made creation, he made it good, and when he made humanity, they were very good. What we are seeing now is bad. It is threatening to life, and frightening, and out of our control. It’s impossible to answer the ‘why’ questions, but Genesis does tell us that the fall gave rise to disharmony, brokenness, and evil. What was first intricately and beautifully connected is broken and twisted and the relations between humanity and God, human beings with one another, and humanity and creation are alienated and fractured.
But the Bible also tells us that God created human beings to govern the creation under his watchful care and so it doesn’t surprise me that what we are doing more than anything else right now is trying to bring this threatening and hostile aspect of creation under our control in every way we can. We know that to some extent, we are powerless, but we also know that if we can find a vaccine, if we can change the way we behave, if we can find a treatment, that we can defeat this hidden predator and save lives. As societies, we are offended by those who are not helping or making things worse. We know that the key to winning this war is good and wise management and so we take encouragement from various things:
- Scientists are working around the clock to find cures and a vaccine for which we are grateful.
- Specialists and experts are coming forward to advise governments and all of us on how we should tackle this.
- We can learn lessons from this that will protect future generations from this sort of scenario ever happening again.
- People in all places are displaying righteousness in one form or another. I’ve been so impressed by how sacrificial some companies have been at protecting their workers, protecting the elderly, caring for the vulnerable.
Linked to this was another reason that I chose this passage. In the week leading up the devotions I was horrified by the rhetoric coming out of the US about the over 70s being expendable because they were no longer working and contributing to the economy. As I read through Genesis 1 and 2 and I got to the part where God himself establishes the Sabbath and rests so that his people would learn to rest, it struck me how wicked it is to imagine that those who cannot ‘work’ to earn money should be seen as having nothing to contribute to society. The Sabbath rhythm demonstrates that one of the rewards for older people, who have worked through their lives, is that they should have time to rest, to spend time with their families, and be honoured just for who they are. I can’t describe how much my own parents gave to us and to our children in their 70s. I can’t express how grateful and blessed we all were to have them, their wisdom, their fun now that they were retired, their home that was a place where we could all flop and rest ourselves. Our children adored their grandparents and had the invaluable gift of being the centre of their worlds and the pride of their lives.
But even then, even if they hadn’t given us anything, it would have been a privilege to have them in our lives. I don’t want to live in a society where people forget that to care for people who cannot care back is a privilege for the carer. It is also something we may all need one day and so it reminds us of our own sense of frailty and dependence. It forms us in ways that nothing else can and challenges all of our selfish, utilitarian impulses. It reminds us to value a life because it is a life and God has breathed it into being. It makes us more Christlike and thus, more human. If we, for a second, imagine that we would be better off without the elderly and the vulnerable we have completely forgotten who we are and what we were made for and we have lost our Christian foundations altogether.
The Lord is My Shepherd
Back in January, at our residential, one of my colleagues, Freddy Hedley, led us in a devotion that I found deeply moving. I have to admit that my heart sank a bit when he said he was going to lead us in a meditation. I’m normally really bad at anything that looks like meditation because my mind is too restless, but this time was different. I felt as if we were on holy ground. Freddy shared that he had found it hard to sleep the night before, but that instead of fretting and worrying or turning on his computer or phone, he had decided that he would lie there and meditate on Psalm 23. He repeated it over and over until he fell asleep. The next day he led us as a college in the same meditation, repeating the Psalm slowly and deliberately over us. I think he spoke it out four or five times, each time slower than the last. By the final time, every word seemed to be speaking to us all; it sank into our hearts and our minds. I felt we had been led into God’s transforming presence and it’s stayed with me ever since.
Pray Without Ceasing
I’ll finish where I started and that is with the idea that, for all our faults, at least we Charismatics will be praying. We’ll pray believing that our prayers make a difference and that God can change things. We’ll be praying for governments and nations, families and individuals, businesses and charities, people on the frontline rushed off their feet and people at home on their own. We’ll be praying for healings, for miraculous provision, and for signs and wonders in the times up ahead. Hopefully, we’ll also be doing, caring, reaching out to the vulnerable, the sick, and the elderly. And we’ll be encouraging one another to remain hopeful, to keep giving, and to seek God’s face in the chaos and confusion.
Whatever your circumstances, and whatever you’re facing, I pray,
The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.
I will finish by letting you read Psalm 23 for yourself. I hope it speaks to you.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
he leads me beside still waters;
he restores my soul.
He leads me in right paths
for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I fear no evil;
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff—
they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
my whole life long.
Amen.
[1] Francesca Melandri, “A Letter to the UK from Italy: this is what we know about your future.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/27/a-letter-to-the-uk-from-italy-this-is-what-we-know-about-your-future?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR2GE647NQmb-7d1YapgUC0E9NXuEE9ylpAi3w1QNwThX7nQr4UhiPk7qpo
[2] James F. McGrath, “What Does the Bible Say about Coronavirus?” https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2020/03/what-does-the-bible-say-about-coronavirus.html
Charismatic Christians, Crisis, and Coronavirus: Part II
This is the second of a series of three posts on Charismatic Christians, Crisis, and Coronavirus. For part one go HERE.
Faith Not Fear or Denial?
Here’s another bit of a verse, ‘…perfect love casts out fear…’ (The middle of 1 John 4:18). I’m not going to go into detail of the context of this fragment here, but the main thrust of these verses is that those who have put their trust in Jesus and who are abiding in God’s love need not fear the final judgement. It really isn’t about God’s love casting out all the fears we have from spiders to dark alleys to plane crashes. It’s not that I don’t think God doesn’t help us not to fear in general. I believe he does, and I have my own testimony of being delivered of specific fears. But this verse used as a way of telling people that they should choose faith, not fear is laden with burdens for the believer. Is it the perfection of God’s love in me that will cast out my fear or the perfection of my love for God? Either way, how do I make this happen? What do I do when I fear?
Life itself and our loved ones are a precious gift from God and proof of their goodness is how desperately we don’t want to lose them. It is not wrong to feel deep anguish over suffering and the prospect of death, our own, our loved ones, those we have never met. One of the most poignant and powerful stories in our Bibles is the story of Jesus in Gethsemane. He was entirely on his own and the disciples were asleep so he must have confided in his disciples later what he went through that night. Jesus held tenaciously to his human life, facing grief and anguish and even sweating drops of blood at the prospect of human suffering and death, while also being willing to submit it wholly to his Father (Matt 26:37-42; Lk 22:41-44; Mk 14:34-36). He taught his disciples to do the same.
It’s natural to fear in a crisis, to wake up in the night in a cold sweat or a panic. But we won’t strengthen one another by forcing each other into denial. And we certainly won’t strengthen one another with false promises. If fear is threatening to swamp us, we are going to need good practices and strategies for this and in my experience, it will require many different approaches. Immersing ourselves in our favourite psalms, listening to music, getting our friends to pray, praying in tongues, focussed breathing, talking to a loved one. How about recognizing fear and anguish as a prayerful longing that things would change and be different, and offering it to God as a sacrifice, laying it on the altar with all our tears. We can and should encourage one another to grow in our complete trust in God, but I imagine that overcoming fear will be a process and not a one-off prayer.
Lament
This brings me to lament and grief. I’ve loved working with my colleague, Matt Lynch, for the last eight years. He’s taught me a lot about the need for a church that laments, and I’ve seen how powerful his teaching is for our students and those who hear it.
Matt writes,
‘Lament opposes denial and false optimism. It acknowledges honestly before God the distress, ill-health, dangers, and troubles that we face. Prayers and songs of lament constitute nearly 40% of Psalms, yet mainstream Charismatic worship hardly gives it a passing nod. Unfortunately, that leaves the church poorly discipled to face times of calamity with the kind of raw honesty that we see in Psalms. Ignoring lament also distances us from the example of Jesus, who lamented from the cross and throughout his life (Matt 27:46; Heb 5:7), and from life in the Spirit, who groans and laments to the Father (Rom 8:26).[1]’ For more of Matt’s reflections on lament, see his series of posts here.
Charismatics are so bad at acknowledging pain and loss, especially during a crisis, unless it’s part of a story where God has turned my mourning into dancing. (Ps 30:11) We can sow in tears as long as we are going to reap with shouts of joy. (Ps 126:5) The idea of a permanent sense of loss or grief is excluded from our narratives. We often only share our testimonies once we have a happy ending.
We are facing potentially huge griefs and losses, some have already seen loved ones die, and even now people are having to deal with small but not insignificant griefs and losses. It may seem trivial in life and death situations, but the pain of leaving school friends and college friends with no goodbyes is hard, letting go of weddings, funerals, special occasions, longed for holidays—these will all take their toll. There will be many mini-griefs alongside the major ones. On top of that, we’re watching as other countries face the most appalling tragedies and this and our own unfolding tragedies will sow its own trauma.
I was brought up by a mother whose own mother died when she was six days old and I would say she had a permanent sense of loss. She never knew her mother. Her father remarried a woman who couldn’t take her mother’s place, and her own mothering was coloured by a sense that she was giving what she never had herself. The wounding in my mother changed her faith, her view of God, and her compassion for others. She became an amazingly gifted bereavement counsellor and chaplain, working first in a hospice, and then a men’s prison until her mid-70s. She taught us that joy lives side by side with pain, that you can dance even though you mourn, and that you can weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. I imagine we are all going to have to learn this gift in the years to come.
God’s Will?
Someone put on Facebook recently that they had seen people saying things like God has caused this crisis, this is God’s will, God is giving us what we deserve. I haven’t seen that kind of thing, but we all know this happens. The idea of God’s control or not of the events of history is a complex and emotive issue and I’m not going to go into all the nuances of the debates here because it requires some in-depth biblical and philosophical reasoning. It’s a good reason to study theology to explore these questions.
What I do want to say first of all, is that it’s very natural, whatever our belief systems and worldviews to try and find a reason for what is happening, especially when we’ve been blindsided by tragedy. So people of all faiths and no faith will try to identify a cause within their own framework of knowing why this crisis is happening. They will look for explanations within what they know of how the world works. This could be in relation to God, or the gods and goddesses. It could be attributed to the selfishness and exploitative nature of human beings (if you are not a Christian) or what we would call sin if you are. A friend of mine sent me an article on the link between Corona and 5G. Or, it maybe you see this virus as the world running according to its own natural forces. We just happen to be on the raw end of it all right now.
I think there will always be people who attribute absolutely everything that happens in the world (including the bad things) to God’s ‘will’ and, to be fair, we can find a foundation for that in the Bible, expressed in different ways in different places, perhaps especially in the OT prophets. Some biblical writers depict suffering or disaster as having been inflicted by God either as a punishment, or to bring people to repentance, or both. These passages sit alongside promises of restoration, complete forgiveness, boundless mercy, and the assurance that God will keep his covenant promises. And this is not a case of pitting the OT wrathful God against the forgiving Jesus of the NT. For a meditation on how God does not treat us as our sins deserve, but forgives all our iniquity and heals all our diseases, why not memorize Psalm 103? It sounds remarkably like the God of Jesus to me.
When God does come to earth in Christ, he reinforces the extraordinary truth that God so loves the world, he has come to save it. The incarnation tells us that God the Son takes on the frailty of human flesh and the vulnerability of a fully human existence to redeem our earthly lives. He comes to earth to take on our sin and suffering into himself, into his very being, to die in our place, to defeat death through his resurrection, and by doing so, to transform our corrupt and broken existence into a new and perfect creation. He comes to earth in love to win us back to himself. This is God’s will for humanity—that all should be saved (1 Tim 2:3-5).
As for whether this signals the end times or not, Christians throughout the ages have believed that the end is imminent. So far, they’ve been wrong, but who’s to say when someone will be right? Christians are perpetually called to live their lives as if they might end tomorrow. It seems, though, that for those of us who live in a world where that has seemed so unlikely for so long, have simply forgotten that this is the case.
In the final post, I look at the importance of history, and where we might turn to in the Bible for understanding and comfort.
For the final post, go HERE
[1] Greek στεναγμός, used here of the Spirit’s groanings, is used throughout the Greek Old Testament to describe the act of lament (e.g., Ps 12:5 = LXX 11:6).
Charismatic Christians, Crisis, and Coronavirus: Part I
We all have good habits and bad habits, and good habits that can become bad habits when exaggerated in a crisis. Similarly, we all have good and bad spiritual habits, and good habits that can become bad habits.
Fan into flame the gift
Fan into flame the gift…
On a Sunday in early October, Mike Neelley and I went into Skagit County Jail together for our weekly services. Five men gathered around a stainless steel table cemented into the floor. We began with a prayer and then I passed out photocopies of 2 Timothy 1:6-14 – the passage on the gift of God.
I invite someone to read the first verse:
“For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands.”
I offer a brief introduction by stating that God has gifts for all of us– spiritual gifts. These gifts are different from natural abilities, like being artistic, perceptive or a good communicator. Spiritual gifts are distinct from learned skills like carpentry, welding, or auto mechanics. They include healing, prophesy, identifying evil spirits that afflict people, faith, and many others.
“Maybe some of you already know of a gift God has given you,” I suggest, looking around at blank faces.
“Or, maybe some of you still don’t know if God has given you a spiritual gift, and you’d like to receive something.”
The men seem to resonate with this option. I go on to share how these gifts enable us to become actively involved in God’s liberating work in the world,
I share how exercising a spiritual gift, like praying for someone to be healed or sharing a prophetic impression requires faith, which means taking risks. I ask someone to read the next verse:
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and discipline.”
Hearing these verses in the heart of the jail, with the TV blaring a football game suddenly made me feel vulnerable. I think I was then and there experiencing the kind of fear or timidity we’d just read about. The next verse seemed to expose and directly address the underlying issue:
“Therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord or of me His prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel according to the power of God, who has saved us and called us with a holy calling.”
We talk about how natural it is to feel ashamed to believe in God’s liberating actions and of Jesus himself. You can feel like a fool believing in an invisible God.
Yet in the face of this Paul writes as an inmate himself, urging people not be ashamed. After all Jesus has saved us, and we need saving. Still when we respond to his call we do enter into a kind of suffering, which the apostle acknowledges. But Christ Jesus “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.”
Suddenly I remember that the men hadn’t seemed aware that they had received a spiritual gift. I suggest that Mike and I would love to ask the Holy Spirit to reveal each person’s spiritual gift, and that we could gladly ask God to give new gifts.
The men all seemed eager to for whatever was going to happen next. Mike and I looked at each other and began to go for it, taking turns to speak prophetically over each man around the table.
Each man seemed to soak up the words of affirmation that Mike and I offered, agreeing with the gifts that we identified or spoke over them. We could see new hope ignited, there in this place of bleakness where negativity, harsh labels and curses abound.
Only one man joined us in “P pod”—a Mexican American guy with stars tattooed on his cheeks, barely visible under long curly black hair parted in the middle. He is a man of deep conviction, born of suffering through years in prison.
Mike and I were moved by how easy it was to identify people’s spiritual gifts in the jail setting, and how precious and welcomed God’s perspective is among those who feel downtrodden.
We wrap up our time with each group by encouraging the men to step our in faith—fanning into flame their gifts. We encourage them to not let fear paralyze them, but God’s power, love and disciple.
Paul’s final words seem the perfect charge: “Guard, through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us, the treasure which has been entrusted to you.”
Mike and I find ourselves being deeply encouraged by this Scripture and our experience with the men. I share this message at Tierra Nueva’s service that day, and the work continues.
For further reflections on the gifts of the Spirit, read “Guerrilla tactics: signs, wonders, justice and mercy,” chapter nine in Guerrilla Gospel: Reading the Bible for Liberation in the Power of the Spirit.
A Christian Response to the Housing Crisis
One of our faculty, Dr Stephen Backhouse, was invited to be part of the Archbishop’s Housing Commission. Here he writes about the purpose of the Commission and what he and others contribute from a theological perspective.
Coming Out of Complementarianism: One woman’s long journey to freedom
I recently received a letter from a woman explaining to me how she had been on a journey out of complementarianism, what that had meant for her, her relationship with God, the women around her, and her marriage.