Posts by Tom Wharin

I see that Banksy’s been at it again.  This time it’s a mural of reindeer whisking away the bench on which the homeless man sleeps.  As usual it’s a piece of imaginative, timely deconstruction and a headache for the landowner who now has to protect a priceless work of art from vandals.  Banksy is a prophet.  Time and again he calls out the corruption of economies, dividing walls, industry and power structures.  Each new artwork an anonymous plaintive rage against the machine.  We all forgive him the vandalism because the brilliant murals harnesses our own frustrations with the system.  His 2004 work “Barcode” is my favourite.

But there is a problem with the prophet Banksy.   He warns us about the failures of our systems; he points out the corruption of our leaders; he highlights the shortcomings of cultures, but I have yet to see a Banksy that suggests an alternative.  Banksy likes to deconstruct.  Even when he builds a theme park or a shop, it’s made to tear down. 

Jesus was also a prophet.  No spray can stencils, just wild prophetic acts and publicity stunts.  Turning the tables in the temple.  Hanging out with tax collectors and sinners.  Healing on the Sabbath.  He called out the corruption of the politico-religious system of the day.  He would have been all over everyone else’s social media. 

But Jesus is a constructor.  I will build my church he says.  The Kingdom of God has come near you he says.  Go and make disciples of all nations..  teaching them to obey what I have commanded you.  He starts with a small cell of followers and leads them in a new way of life.  Forgiveness, discipline, hope against hope, humility, worship, self giving, generosity.  A new community of men and women dedicated to living life God’s way.  And so twelve become hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands and millions until Constantine capitulates and compromises and contaminates because he can’t contain Christians.

But despite the contamination, construction continues.  New lives, new hope, new schools and hospitals and rehab centres and churches (people not buildings) in places you wouldn’t expect all atound the world.  Jesus does tear down.  But he also builds.  Maybe I’m doing Banksy a disservice.  Perhaps his anonymous alter-ego is building something beautiful.  The Beaste boys said ‘it takes a second to wreck, it takes time to build.’   Jesus said ‘I will build my church and the gates of death will not prevail against it’.  I’m with Jesus.  On with the building.     

I have got properly soaked on the way to or from work twice in the last 10 days. Neither drenching was pleasant, but neither was a big problem because I was prepared and I am waterproof.  A cycling friend of mine at university reckoned that if you cycle to work regularly you’ll get properly drenched 11 times a year.  I’ve never counted, but I don’t think he was too far wrong.   

As a teenage Christian, I was nearly as annoyed as Greta.  The Christian narrative – God made the world good, we stuffed it up, Jesus redeemed us and calls us to redeem the world – seemed to point clearly to our responsibility to care for our planet and the people on it.  Any yet everyone still drove to church…. Because everyone drove everywhere.   

For the last 20 years we have paid slightly over the odds for Green electricity at home.  I was delighted to discover today that since 1990 UK greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation have fallen by 57%. It was so good to be able to tell the kids that they have been part real progress towards good stewardship of our planets’ finite resources.  At the same time however, greenhouse gas emissions from transport have stayed more or less static.  

This is partly because the UK is still absolutely addicted to cars.  I went to a parents evening at a local school recently.  I think most of us live within 2 miles of the school.  Nearly all of us drove.  We have a chronic parking problem in our small, thriving town and yet lots of us still drive our kids to primary school or to the shops and then get eggy with one another about our driving / parking.  Some days it’s hard to park at our local sports centre because we’ve all driven 1.5 miles to get there..  Obviously there are people who need to drive due to infirmity or advancing age.  But if we’re fit enough to play sports, surely we’re fit enough to get there without a car.

There is a cheap, simple, two wheeled solution to this problem.  It will mean a soaking 11 times a year, but that’s OK if you’re ready for it.  There is also a slightly more expensive solution for the hills (Wotton’s favourite excuse): earlier this summer my son and I were overtaken just before the top of a 1000m climb up a Swiss mountain pass by two chatting ladies on e-bikes.    

Extinction rebellion are right to challenge the status quo (I think Tyndale would be more embarrassed that was remembered with a monument than he would be annoyed about it’s use for causes other than his own).  Corporations and governments need to change policies, expand public transport routes and subsidise e-bikes.  But we need to change too, even if it means getting the occasional drenching. 

I absolutely nailed it.  The trail conditions were perfect and the bike was running sweetly.   I was so lost in my ponderings over what to name the ride that the climbs disappeared.  I flew down the hills occasionally literally, confident of some personal records and maybe even a shuffle in the rankings.  I also had a good think through Sundays sermon and was enjoying beautiful Gloucestershire and the benefits of vigorous exercise…  And then I got home and realised that Strava had not recorded.  And for a brief moment, my perfect ride was tarnished.  Because part of me felt like it’s not real if it’s not online.

I remember reading a 2002 essay by Conrad Gempf (one of my LST lecturers) about the potential in the internet age for de-materialism – an increasing valuing of online information, interaction and image over physical relationships and transactions.  At the time so little of my life was online that it seemed far-fetched.  But now I’m on Strava, and Facebook, and Ebay and Gumtree and You Tube and WordPress and online school-canteen-thumb-print-activated payments. 

Conrad’s essay noted that early Christians had to wrestle with popular varieties of Platonism which over-valued the spiritual in comparison with the the physical (leading to the detriment of physical existence either through over-indulgence or uber self-denial).  Gnostics, they called themselves because they had the special spiritual inside track (gnosis or knowledge).     True Christianity was much more earthy.  Jesus “LIVED in Capernaum,” “The word became FLESH and dwelt among us”.  So how you live and what you do with your flesh matter.  Jesus believed the Old Testament with all it’s eating, drinking, sex, holidays and politics and instructions on how to do them well because God seems to think that the physical counts just as much as the spiritual.

Obviously my online life can be massively beneficial to my real life.  Our Facebook-arranged 20 year University re-union being a case in point.  My online life does serve to measure my real life in scientific terms (the reality is that I am slower than my son on the road and woefully short of any off-road KOMs).  It can advertise my thoughts and causes and help me to access thinking to stretch mine and causes in which to invest.   But if I am true to my Christian faith, online life must never take precedence over real life (physical and spiritual).  My kids will need to hear this even more than me in years to come.  I questioned Conrad’s quirky thoughts in 2002.  I think my kids would read them as blatantly obvious fact and would probably suggest that I blogged this to make up for the Strava failure.

I looked away while the lads leered. 

I looked away because she is someone else’s daughter. 

I looked away because my sons can see her. 

I looked away because there are too many lying pictures in my memory already. 

I should have said something. I tell girls that they are valued for who they are. 

I should have said something. I oppose slavery.  

I should have said something.  Abuse is so tough and time consuming to unravel. 

I should have said something.  These vines strangle real relationships. 

But I just looked away and then it was too late. 

Looking away is not the whole point. 

Next time I will speak out. 

It’s our china wedding anniversary today and we have been happy for most of our first 20 years.  We have had the privilege of preparing a few couples for marriage as well as the deep sadness of seeing marriages around us faltering.  I thought I might take the liberty of offering you my tentative thoughts on what makes for happy marriage.

I think it’s a good idea to find the right person.  Someone who you admire, find sexually attractive and agree with on issues that really matter to you.  Yes this does mean it’s a good idea for atheists to marry atheists and muslims to marry muslims.  I know that sounds horribly sectarian to the secular humanist ear, but marriage is about doing life together and differing motivating worldviews easily lead to unmanageable tension in finance, time and prioritising.    It also means it’s likely a bad idea to marry someone you met last week who is fun, good looking and great in bed, but you might just find to be intellectually, morally, emotionally or professionally daft.  Discerning the right person is not necessarily easy.  For us it involved a great deal of anxiety, prayer and listening to the opinions of trustworthy friends and family (including the mutual friend who originally set us up). 

I also think marriage is key to a happy marriage.  A freely entered into partnership of two people for life, incorporating exclusive sexual intimacy (sometimes with the attendant possibility of children), recognised by the community and ordained by God.  Being single was often brilliant.  Lots of late nights with lots of friends, lots of mountain biking and drumming and church stuff, drop everything and scarper weekends (mostly more mountain biking) and unlimited shed-time.  St Paul talked about his freedom to be single-mindedly focussed on God.   Singleness is tough to surrender – the merging of two bank accounts, diaries, careers and lifetyles.  The first year of marriage for all its tenderness and joy was one of the toughest.  Which is why singleness should not be surrendered for anything less than life-long marriage.  There will be times when cutting and running will be genuinely easier, but the understanding that this is permanent and that we will be committed to selflessly loving one another makes the possibility of better times ahead significantly more likely.     

I recognise that these ideas are not rocket-scientific secret revelations and my observation is that human life in a fallen world is enough to place even marriage to the right person under massive strain. That said, these ideas have worked well for us and I have observed them working well for enough other people that I plan to stick by them as well as sticking with Jo.  I’ll put up a confirmatory post on our Ruby wedding anniversary if Jesus does not return first.

After the people of Israel had been delivered from slavery in Egypt, some of them wanted to go back, because in Egypt they had cucumbers.  I remember as a child reading this with disbelief.  Unlike our kids I did not like cucumbers so the thought that anyone would give up freedom for salad veg was utterly incomprehensible.  I think I get it now.

I’ve been employed by a couple of local churches for the last 15 years to preach about freedom.  It’s not just a professional thing.  I believe it.  I have experienced the freedom, forgiveness, belonging and purpose that come from being a follower of Jesus.  Our church is unusual in UK terms in that it is growing, but it is not growing fast.  We’re involved in lots of different aspects of the life of our community and have positive relationships with schools, families and community organisations.  People know us and they know we are not the right wing, all-phobic killjoys Christians are widely painted as, but the message of freedom in following Jesus is still a hard sell.

Why is this?

Christians look the same as other people but they are going in a radically different direction.  We’re swimming against the tide of materialism.  Christians believe in generosity and are opposed to greed.  It looks to us like the U.K. is borrowing money we can’t afford to buy stuff we don’t need to fuel an economy we know is unsustainable.  We’re going against the flow of hedonism.  Christians recognise the God given-ness of sex, drink and drugs but we observe the God-given boundaries to their use.  It looks to us like Britain is busy enjoying the high that comes from the weed that wrecks supply-chain lives and leaves users spaced out from economic and relational reality.  Perhaps most radically of all, Christians are setting aside their autonomy to make Jesus the ultimate authority in their lives.  It looks to us like the West is so committed to educating kids in every trend of individual self-determination that the kids will be too busy wondering who they are and where they belong to work together to build a better world.

Looking from the outside Christianity may appear like slavery: the surrender of individual sovereignty to a higher authority; eschewal of much of the spectrum of available pleasures; rejection of reliance on over-accumulated wealth.    Indeed St Paul described us as slaves to Christ.  But looking from the inside of Christianity outwards, it looks like the average Westerner is the slave – to money, pleasure and power.  

I-phones, sex lives and self-determination you say.   I say cucumbers.   I think this difference of perspective goes a long way towards explaining why Christianity is hard to propagate in the UK.

The last two weeks have been full of magical football moments.  The quick thinking corner from Trent Alexander Arnold and the ball boy; Lucas Moura’s last ditch goal and that Kompany shot.  But this week, something entirely different grabbed my attention.  I had just got home from work to join my oldest son in watching the closing seconds of the play off match between the league two Rovers when the camera homed in on a Tranmere fan. He was standing on the barriers, wildly celebrating his club’s progression to the final and his face seemed familiar.  After a closer look I checked with our the boy, who confirmed that this was none other than Mike Dean, the premier league referee who has presided over FA and League cup finals and recently produced his 100^th top flight red card.  I’m no expert in football or refereeing, but it seems like a good thing to me that a man who presides over the millionaires and prima donnas of our top division loves football.

We don’t like the idea of being judged.  The idea of God as a Judge is sobering and scary for theists, annoying for atheists and sometimes uncomfortable for Christians.  But we all know that rules contribute to a good game, laws make for a stable country and honesty makes for good relationships.  We also know that human beings have a propensity to break rules, dodge laws and lie when it suits our purposes.  Cards need to be shown; we need a referee. 

Whether we like it or not, God is the judge of all the earth.  He judges with perfect justice and equity.  All history must give account to him and the account of our misdemeanours must be settled in person.  We might get away with it even for a lifetime, but then all will appear before the throne of judgement on his appointed day.  We have a referee. 

God thinks the world is good.  He has good plans for you.  He loves you.  But he cannot just let the mess we have made of the world go and he will judge us.  So he has made a provision for us by serving our sentence, observing our ban, receiving our cards himself.  God loved the world so much that he gave his only son so that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life in the future, and life in all its fullness now.   Mike Dean is not like God in the perfection of his judgement or his provision for offenders.  But the close-up at The New Lawn on Monday night was a delightful reminder that this referee loves the game. 

I don’t get to nerd out about rocks very often, but last Tuesday I had a lot of fun talking to some local primary school kids about Volcanoes.    Subsequently I have had some conversations which suggest that this kind of thing is not normal.  There’s something in the air that tells us that God and science don’t go together. 

In my world this is nonsense.  Lots of my clerical colleagues have first degrees in scientific subjects.  In fact I am not the only Baptist Minister in the West of England Baptist Association who has an earth sciences degree from the University of Sheffield and a Theology degree from London School of Theology!  The previous minister of our local Methodist church was a former nuclear physicist.  Bill Bryson’s brilliant popular history of science ‘A Brief History of Nearly Everything’ begins with a chapter called ‘Reverend Evans Universe’ about a genius Methodist minister who holds the world record for visual discoveries of supernovae.   Clerics don’t seem to think that Science and religion are enemies…..

And neither do many scientists…  Plenty of members of our churches have higher degrees and jobs involving science on a day to day basis.  An atheist friend once told me that the Cambrian explosion of life does away with the need for the creation narratives of the bible.  In response, I noted that one of the most senior palaeontologists in the UK with specific expertise in the Burgess Shale fauna (probably the most famous Cambrian explosion of life fossil fauna), Professor Simon Conway Morris,  IS A PROFESSING CHRISTIAN.  The most famous palaeontologist of them all (and as far as I know, the only one to appear in the Simpsons), Stephen Jay Gould said ‘Unless half of my collegaues are dunces, there can be  – on the most raw and empirical grounds – no conflict between science and religion.’  Lots and lots and lots of scientists hold to the Christian faith and other faiths.

So how did we all learn that science and faith do not go together (every school kid seems to know this).

I’ve blogged previously about the rise of Young Earth Creationism in the 1920s, but that is only half of the story. 

God is very inconvenient.  He likes fair trade and equal treatment of human beings.  He has standards for personal relationships, corporate finances and social care.  So, if you’d like to justify infanticide or modern slavery, late payment of invoices, relationship-free sex or the neglect of the needy etc, God cannot be your pal.  It would be much better for you to ignore him until you feel aggrieved about the cards the random universe has dealt you, briefly wheel him out of the cupboard as a scapegoat and then bolt the cupboard and carry on as before.   It seems to me that this is precisely what popular secular humanism does. We’re all told that science has killed God (which means we can do as we please) and that it’s OK to simultaneously blame God for all the bad stuff people do.    This seems to be a dominant meme (thanks Richard) derived from secular humanism in our culture, which allows us to do away with the inconvenience of God.

So Richard Dawkins shouts about science killing God and how we can now do as we please.  Ken Ham shouts back about how the bible disproves science and how science leads to wickedness and depravity.  And meanwhile normal, moral, sensible, Christians (some of whom are scientists) and normal, moral, sensible scientists (some of whom are Christians) quietly go about their daily lives.  Maybe it’s time normal, moral, sensible people started shouting down this ridiculous meme.  Meanwhile I was glad of the chance to talk Vulcanology with a bright eyed group of year 4s.    

Seven MPs resigned from the labour party yesterday and I felt glad.    It felt like breath of fresh air for me because like them, I don’t  I feel like I don’t belong in the party politics of 2019.

My parents never told us who they voted for, but the CND marches, support for the miners and general disparagement of privatisation didn’t leave much to the imagination.  So red (and occasionally green) was always where I felt I belonged politically.  My parents did however tell me where they stood regards God – stories of Jesus and of their own faith – but they left it up to me to make my own mind up about that too.

I became a Christian when I was 13, but was not until I was at theological college in my mid twenties that I began to think more seriously about Christian politics.  This has crystallised with the help of Jim Wallis, C.A.R.E., The Jubilee Centre, The Evangelical Alliance and others to a kind of Christian Relationism.  I’m pretty sure that I know what the bible says is important:  human relationships, freedom, justice and good stewardship of resources.   In recent years I have found myself more socially conservative than the Tories (on relationship issues), more liberal than the Lib Dems (on freedom of belief and expression), struggling to see realism in the new green and SNP visions of the future and alienated from Labour (on Brexit, anti-Semitism, Corbynism etc).  I’m disillusioned with the whole system in which profit is always the bottom line and party tribalism seems to be trump the national interest.  Which is why my ears pricked at these resignations. 

One of my favourite stories in the bible is the parable of the Shrewd Manager. The manager realises he is going to get fired and cuts his masters debts, ingratiating himself with the debtors and painting his master in a generous light.  When he gets fired, the master has to grudgingly commend him for his shrewd handling of the situation.  Jesus goes on to say ‘use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone you’ll be welcomed into eternal dwellings.’ (Luke 16:9)   The point is not that Christians should cheat their employers – there are plenty of commandments and stories in the bible that show God does not approve of that.  The point is that if you’re a follower of Jesus, you graft for a different gaffer, you belong in a different kingdom – not round here. Use whatever is at your disposal to invest there.

The Christians I know are activists, stuck into making a difference to society through all sorts of voluntary community, development and advocacy work in their spare time.  This voluntary work can be really fulfilling, but it can also feel like you are swimming against the tide of a world where people and relationships are deemed less important than profit and party politics.   The same Christians work in industry, for statutory bodies and in the finance and service sectors.  Faith generally makes for loyal, honest and hard-working employees; but there are times when Christian values clash with company procedures and Christians take a stand and/or feel marginalised. Holding a different set of values and investing in a different kingdom can feel alienating.

Maybe this voicing of political alienation by seven ex labour MPs is the dawn of a new politics in the UK or maybe this will come to nothing. Whatever happens, I’m going to keep using such economic and political influence as I do have to invest in God’s kingdom, where I feel and know I belong…  And it’s good to know that I’m not the only one who does not feel they belong in the party politics of the UK in 2019.

Most of the books I read are theological texts for nerds like me and are not worth recommending publicly.  I do like a good story however and occasionally put the big books down to read a novel someone has recommended.  Last week I did this to read Paula Gooder’s novel Phoebe.  This week I want to recommend it to you.

Many theological nerds are good at arguing over fine points of doctrine.  A few of them, like NT Wright or Greg Boyd are also good at communicating at a popular level and a very small number of them like Walter Wangerin or Bruce Longernecker can write a good historical novel which weaves together biblical history and a good yarn. 

In Phoebe, Paula Gooder has done this with aplomb & I would recommend this book to anyone who either likes a good story or wants to get their head round the environment into which much of the New Testament was written.  The real Phoebe was a Christian leader and benefactor at Cenchreae near Corinth.  She gets a brief mention in Romans 16:1-2 and Paula Gooder extrapolates out from this point, drawing in threads from across the New Testament and other historical sources.  She paints some lovely true-to-Christian-life character pictures around marginal biblical and fictional figures with lots of local colour.  I smiled at the biblical allusions, laughed out loud at the parallels with church life and am wondering whether I need to read it again because I did not see the ending coming! 

I’d love to think that Paul was not quite so ugly or antisocial as Gooder paints him, but history and what remains of his own writings have definitely left him open to these charges.  Also, I struggled to get the voice of Dobby the house elf out of my head when reading about the young Felix.  That said, this is a really good book, looking from a Christian viewpoint at the spread of the good news of Jesus and at the honour and filth of first century Rome.    Buy it and read it!  (Or borrow my copy because it’s only available in over-expensive hard back at the moment).

Phoebe, a story,  Paula Gooder,  Hodder and Stoughton 2018 ISBN 978-1-473-66972-7