Spiritual direction in the nonconformist tradition

There has been a recent, and welcome, tradition of the various Principals of our Baptist colleges in the UK publishing jointly-authored books (something of the story of how this came to be is told in a chapter in Fiddes, et al., Doing Theology in A Baptist Way (Whitley, 2000)); the most recent contribution is in the Regent’s Study Guides series, Fiddes (ed.), Under the Rule of Christ: Dimensions of Baptist Spirituality (Smyth & Helwys, 2008). The various chapters in the book treat various themes, not including spiritual direction: Paul Fiddes and Steve Finnamore look at ‘Baptists and Spirituality’; Richard Kidd looks at suffering; Nigel Wright at ‘Spirituality as Discipleship: the Anabaptist heritage’; Jim Gordon treats Scripture; John Weaver the Eucharist; and Chris Ellis Mission.

There are many good things in the book; one of the repeated emphases, however, perhaps more powerful because it is apparently unconscious, is the assumption that, for Baptists, spirituality happens in gathered community – the local church congregation. Of course, there are those (Christopher Jamieson, Abbot of Worth, for one) who would claim that the classical spiritual disciplines only make sense in community, but the recent emphasis of the retreat movement has been on personal spirituality.

This is perhaps particularly the case when it comes to spiritual direction – a quintessentially personal relationship, one-to-one, confidential, and ideally removed at some level from broader life (the advice I have seen seems to suggest that a spiritual director should be someone you never otherwise encounter in your life). I began to wonder, where is there a history of spiritual direction in our Baptist (and broader evangelical and nonconformist) traditions?

We can find examples of ’soul friendships’ from various points in history, which can be mapped onto the concept of spiritual direction, certainly – and I do not want to minimise or decry that; but it is not something natural to us. But if we understand spiritual direction as a process where the disciple is able to give an account of her walk with Christ, and to receive guidance, wisdom, encouragement, and prayer in furthering that walk, then, it struck me, reading the Principals’ book, it is something that is native, and central, to various Baptist, evangelical, and nonconformist traditions. It is just that we do it corporately, not individually.

The purest example is perhaps Wesley’s vision for the Methodist class meeting; this was precisely spiritual direction, but in community – members sharing with and supporting each other. There is at least something of this vision in the theory, if less often in the practice, of Baptist church meeting, however, and the recent proliferation of small group ministry in evangelical churches, whilst usually ill-thought out (small group meetings are too often held to be a Good Thing in themselves, which rather obviously they are not – no meeting is, ever – they have value to the extent that they are useful means directed towards valuable ends), introduces something of this into church life when, by accident or design, it works.

What to say about this? I want to support it – it is native to my tradition, and I believe in the notion of the body of Christ, the local church, being the basic agent of discipleship (and of course of mission) in the world. But I wonder about the practicality of it; in just over twenty years, now, of Christian discipleship, I have been a member of two small groups that have worked on this level, and one church fellowship – places where there were sufficient levels of trust, maturity, and openness to enable honesty about doubts, struggles, fears, joys, and hopes. Easier, far easier, to find a spiritual director who one can trust…

…but ease is never a good criterion for gospel faithfulness.

Chris Moyles’s commentary on charismatic worship

For those who don’t know, Chris Moyles is the most popular radio presenter in Britain; his morning show, on BBC Radio 1 (essentially a mainstream pop music station), attracts approaching 8m listeners. This video contains an extract from his show dubbed over the TV broadcast – of baptisms in a church in Peterborough – that they are discussing in the extract.

Four things strike me about the comments, considered as useful data for missional concern in the UK:
1. Moyles (who is 35) and his posse belong to a generation that is no longer reflexively cynical about church. Britain, and Europe, is often described as ‘post-Christian,’ but this phrase can mean two very different things, or so it seems to me. A culture can be ‘post-Christian’ in the sense that it has consciously turned away from its historic commitment to Christianity. Church is inevitably then regarded as comical, outdated, irrelevant. Or a culture can be ‘post-Christian’ in the sense that it has lost any memory of ever having been Christian. Church is then alien, but at least potentially interesting. I grew up with the tail-end of the former concept; Moyles, four years younger (and a lot more culturally current…), seems firmly in the latter. Across the country, I suspect Moyles’s attitude is common in urban and suburban areas, and more widely in SE England; here in rural Scotland, we are a bit behind the times on this one.
2. The clip also demonstrates the lack of even basic knowledge concerning Christianity that younger generations in Britain now have. This is a missional issue – the Alpha course, for instance, assumes a significant level of cultural Christian understanding in its teaching material.
3. What is it that Moyles found attractive about this church service? Two things, it seems to me. Obviously, enthusiasm, commitment, engagement was important – ‘I’ve been to gigs with less atmosphere’. The church presented itself as vibrant and exciting, and this is in itself attractive.
4. The second attraction, though, was the professionalism of the performance: ‘they had a proper perspex cage around the drum kit and everything…’ They were doing what they did well. No peeling paint, no worn carpets – and you just know that the after-service drinks were not served in institutional green tea-cups!

Matt Redman’s doxological theology

There is a well-established tradition as to how academic theologians deal with contemporary worship music. You first decry the theological poverty of the music, then point to the traditional liturgy as the perfection of doxological theology, then express a wish that the music was more like the liturgy.

Allow me to dissent from the tradition somewhat.

Starting at the end, ‘the traditional liturgy’ strikes me as a deeply problematic concept. There are many different liturgical traditions, each instantiating different theological concerns. For some reason, theologians from a broadly evangelical background (who tend to be the ones decrying contemporary worship music, on account of the fact that they have encountered it) tend to point to Anglican liturgies for proper doxological theology. With all due respect, every Anglican liturgy ever promulgated is, as far as I can see, a theologically-incoherent political compromise between Catholic and Reformed traditions (not excluding the Book of Common Prayer, which when published offered a liturgy judged so poor that something like a third of Anglican clergy resigned their ministries rather than use it – OK, I know it wasn’t quite that simple, but…)

At the other end, is there any serious theological vision in contemporary worship music? Let me take an example, Matt Redman’s FaceDown album. I choose this partly because I know it quite well, and partly because it is, more or less, a live recording of a worship event, and so might be expected to display whatever coherence can be found in this tradition.

The CD begins with ‘Praise Awaits You,’ a song of approach addressed to God, asserting the people are gathered with the intention of worshiping, and are now ready to worship. Already, however, worship is understood as a response to God’s action, a continual theme of the album. Thus, the gathered, ready people cannot yet worship: they come and wait for God’s initiative (’O Lord open our lips / And our mouths shall proclaim your praise’ – if you must).

The next two songs then acknowledge and name the divine action that makes worship possible. First, atonement (’Nothing but the blood’: ‘Your cross testifies to grace, tells of the Father’s heart, to make a way for us…’), and then revelation (’Seeing You’: ‘No one can sing of things they have not seen – open our eyes towards a greater glimpse, the glory of you…’). Worship is now possible, but only as a response to God’s initiative, so the next track, ‘Gifted Response,’ acknowledges this explicitly: ‘This is a gifted response, Father we cannot come to you by our own merit. We will come in the name of your Son…’ The first song of explicit worship, ‘Dancing Generation,’ echoes the gifts of God that enable worship: atonement (’Your mercy taught us how to dance…’) and revelation (’Your glory taught us how to shout…’), both re-affirmed in the bridge (’It’s the overflow of a forgiven soul, and now we’ve seen you Lord, our hearts cannot stay silent…’)

In the narrative of the music, the experience of worship immediately leads to a desire for the deepening of the experience of God. In language strangely reminiscent of accounts of the ascent of the soul in the medieval mystical tradition, there is prayer for a more comprehensive sight of God (’Pure Light’: ‘And through grace untold to see you, with this heart unveiled to know you, Lord in your pure light…’). The granting of this prayer leads to a further response of worship (’Worthy, you are Worthy’) and to the central moment of the CD, the title track:

Welcomed in to the courts of the King
I’ve been ushered in to Your presence
Lord, I stand on Your merciful ground
Yet with every step tread with reverence
And I’ll fall facedown
As your glory shines around…

This is followed by a further reminder that all worship depends on God’s prevenient action, ‘Breathing the Breath’: ‘We have nothing to give that didn’t first come from your hands. We have nothing to offer you which you did not provide.’ Then the music moves into a pair of songs that serve as dismissal: an affirmation (’Mission’s Flame’) that worship must result in action: ‘Let worship be the fuel for mission’s flame. We’re going with a passion for your name…’ and also can provide a motive for mission: ‘Let worship be the heart of mission’s aim – to see the nations recognise your fame, till every tribe and tongue voices your praise, send us out.’ Finally, ‘If I have not love’ borrows from 1 Cor 13:1-3 to affirm that the ultimate result of a vision of God must be an increase of love, for God and for God’s creatures: ‘the overflow of hearts as we gaze upon your beauty…’

We might criticise this for a lack of any account of the Trinitarian shape of worship, but I think that would be unfair. It happens it is there, albeit in passing: ‘We will come in the name of your Son, as He glorifies You, and in the power of Your Spirit’ (’Gifted Response,’ v. 1); more significantly, however, it is not clear to me that good worship needs an explicit account of its theological underpinnings.

What is there here? There is a very strong and constantly-repeated stress that approach to God is possible only because of God’s prevenient action, spelt out here as atonement and revelation. The experience of worship is understood through a journey metaphor, a journey of approach towards God, an experience of God which leads to transformation, and then dismissal to do God’s work in the world. The most distinctive aspect of the doxological theology here is the emphasis on sight: seeing God, experiencing God’s glory, is at the heart of this movement of worship. As I noted above, this is very reminiscent of a particular mystical tradition (I suppose unconsciously; it may be that Matt and Beth Redman are reading the medieval mystics and/or the Eastern hesychasts, but I doubt it).

I’m not going to claim that this is theologically brilliant or perfect; but you could go a long way and find much worse. Academic sneering is, I contest, foolish and misplaced.

Preaching, worship, and reality

(Further thoughts, relating both to my George Beasley-Murray memorial lecture, text available here in case anyone is interested, and to this post.)

Somewhere near the heart of the argument in my GBM lecture was the question, does preaching reflect reality or change it? To take the classic historical example, most of the Lutheran debates about the preaching of the law and the preaching of the gospel turn on the supposition that the preaching of the gospel is effective proclamation: an authoritative declaration that the hearer, merely by virtue of having heard the declaration, is now forgiven and reborn through the atoning sacrifice of Christ (which declaration, of course, demands the response of faith, and permits of no other response).

It seems to me that many of the recent ‘preaching wars’ have been between people who think preaching should reflect the realities of our lives as lived, and people who think preaching should reflect the reality of life as narrated in Scripture. (In Hans Frei’s terms, when preaching do we read the text into the world, or the world into the text?) I suspect that both are wrong: our life as lived is broken, fragmented, partial, unnarratable (’fallen’) – it has no nameable reality. The only proper response to any proposed metanarrative is incredulity; we live in a theatre of the absurd, with no plot, no meaning, to interpret our various exits and entrances. In this context, preaching is an act of re-narration; it is a moment within God’s overarching salvific work of gathering up the broken pieces of life and world and, through Christ, weaving them into new creation, a moment in which the new story of life and world is written, and, by being told, is (at least potentially) actualised.

But this is not merely the announcement of the eternal reality, the unchanging truth, of things as revealed by the text of Scripture; as far as I can see, when it comes to created realities, Scripture is not very interested in unchanging truths. Rather, it is a series of announcements that God is doing a new thing – each new thing, of course, is perfectly congruent with what went before, but it is nonetheless, new, unpredicted, unexepected. The ongoing reality of salvation and sanctification is the weaving together of the broken fragments of our lives into a new story that can make sense. Preaching, thus understood, is a moment in which the Sovereign Lord is making all things new, it is the writing of names thus-far unspoken and unknown (Rev. 3:12) – the creation of hitherto-unimagined identities and meanings. It is, fundamentally, the effectual announcement that in and through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has determined that your life, also, will be changed decisively from this moment on.

(Theological aside 1: As some readers will realise, somewhere beneath all this is a particular account of the relation of created time to God’s eternity, such that election is something eternally real and so actual and happening at every moment in time. Call it ‘Barthian’ if you must, but it is splattered all over the earlier tradition if you bother to look for it (try tracing the doctrine of creatio continua for an extreme example) – as Barth well knew.)

(Theological aside 2: what, then, of Frei? He was, of course, describing an observed shift in hermenuetics when he came up with his memorable phrase (it’s somewhere early in Eclipse; I don’t have either book or precise reference with me); I suspect that the implicit ontology of the post-liberal theology developed by Frei, Lindbeck, and others might tend in the sort of direction I’m describing here, even if none of them would particularly locate the decisive re-narration in the ministry of preaching – Will Willimon has come closest to working it through in these directions, although with a more political slant than I’ve given here.)

If all this is right, then what of worship? Clearly, there is a liturgical place for both the narratings of reality that I have rejected: in worship we do recall and celebrate the eternal truths of God’s deity; and in worship we also hold the contingent and fractured reality of the world before God in intercession and petition. But is that all we do? Does worship change reality also?

The tradition of charismatic hymnody which was one half of the soundtrack of my Christian formation assumed, quite emphatically, that it does: ‘By the power of His blood we now claim this ground’; ‘Come and sing this song with gladness, as your hearts are filled with joy…’; and so on. There are strands of declaratory pronouncement in all traditional liturgy as well: the declaration of forgiveness following the confession; the epiclesis (in the Eastern tradition), or Eucharistic prayer (in the more Catholic end of the Western tradition); almost paradigmatically ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’. In each case, the saying of the words is liturgically assumed to effect a difference in reality. Presumably petitionary or intercessory prayer assumes something similar. A properly-pronounced benediction also tends in the same direction (’The Lord bless you and keep you…’ as opposed to ‘May the Lord…’).

In worship, the community brings the fragments of its several partial and shattered lives before the Lord, not because those fragments are interesting, or even nameable, but because in God’s presence and by God’s Spirit they may and will be made into something new. And so worship ends with dismissal: ‘As God’s redeemed people…’; ‘Go into all the world…’; ‘Our worship is ended; our service begins.’

UPDATE: The link to the GBM lecture text is now fixed. Apologies.

A sonnet for Trinity Sunday

To God the Father

Great God, within whose simple essence we
Nothing but that which is thyself can find:
When on thyself thou did’st reflect thy mind
Thy thought was God, which took the form of thee:
And when this God thus born, thou lov’st, and he
Loved thee again, with passion of like kind,
(As lovers’ sighs, which meet, become one wind)
Both breathed one spright of equal deity.
Eternal father, whence these two do come
And wil’st the title of my father have,
As heavenly knowledge in my mind engrave,
That it thy son’s true image may become:
And cense my heart with sighs of holy Love,
That it the temple of the spright may prove.

Henry Constable (1562-1613)

(A better doctrine of the Trinity than can be found in most current dogmatics, combined with warm-hearted devotion; and all in perfect Petrarchan form; what more could you ask for?!)

The ecclesiological bottom line

Talking to Cid Latty of the cafechurch network, the question of ecclesiology came up. Like many successful evangelistic ventures, cafechurch are finding some of their gatherings being viewed/used as the primary location of church for some of those who attend, rather than as a stepping-stone for people to find their way into the church congregations that began them. (I know of Alpha courses, youth groups, pensioners’ groups, and other places where the same thing has happened.) Cid, responsibly, asked the question, if the cafechurch is becoming church, what does it need to be?

A cafechurch meeting typically involves an element of teaching, probably with some presentation of a Bible text, although it might not be straightforwardly read. It involves discussion and engagement over issues, and majors on real human relationships. It might not involve any corporate – or perhaps even individual – prayer, and probably wouldn’t involve any sung worship. Does this prevent it from being ‘church’?

Surprisingly, the standard theological answer would seem to be ‘no’. The church in ecumenical confession is ‘one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.’ The meaning of those terms will be disputed, but I can’t off-hand think of an account that demands corporate prayer or sung worship. In Reformation confession, the church is marked by the pure preaching of the Word, the right adminstration of the (two) sacraments, and (possibly) the exercise of Biblical church discipline. Cafechurch meetings might not have much in the way of sacraments, but if a newcomer were baptised somewhere on profession of faith (if not already baptised as an infant…), and if twice a year (say) a special meeting involving the celebration of the Eucharist (with bread and wine, of course – not lattes and belgian waffles) were held, the gathering would be ‘church’ by those theological definitions that the tradition supplies.

So what? Well, perhaps this highlights the gaps in those traditional definitions (whose authors and defenders surely assumed that when the church gathered, God’s name would be praised, if not necessarily in song, and prayer would be offered). But the English nonconformist, and Scots Presbyterian, traditions developed in that way during the nineteenth century, sometimes, with the set-piece sermon as the absolute heart of the service of worship, and all else brief and perfunctory (and sometimes referred to as ‘the preliminaries’!)

It’s a good question, though, and a live one missiologically, as Cid demonstrates: what does a gathering need to be to be adequately ‘church’?

Being insulted by a great resource

Last BUGB/BMS Assembly post (I know it’s ugly, but I refuse to call it ‘The Baptist Assembly’ as the organisers do – we’ve got a Baptist Assembly here in Scotland, and there’s one in Wales, and so on). It’s approaching five years since Heather and I moved up here, and so five years since we’ve been to this particular Assembly. The highlight, unquestionably, was reconnecting with old friends and seeing and hearing how vocations and ministries have developed. I also rediscovered some circles I was once a part of. One was the Baptist Union Initiative with people with Learning Disabilities (BUILD), which is celebrating its 25th anniversary, and continues to do creative and amazing things that are more gospel-shaped than any other mission initiative I’ve ever come across; the astonishing Faith Bowers, the best president BUGB never had, told me some of what was going on. Another was the Baptist Retreat Group, where I was greeted by Pamela Neville, whose ability to remember people is remarkable – we had met, but not often, and it was seven years ago…

BRG are revising all their ‘Occasional papers’, which in a few pages offered always wise and sometimes striking counsel on the call to prayer. Simple but necessary topics were covered (Margaret Jarman on ‘How to plan a retreat’; Will Thompson on ‘What is Spiritual Direction?’), along with others, where distinctive Baptist concerns overlapped with the wider retreat movement (Susan Stevenson on ‘Prayer and the City’; John Rackley on ‘The Spirituality of Peace’; Jim Gordon on ‘Listening to God in the Church Meeting’ – now there’s an idea!). As a result of the revision, copies of the old papers were being given away. I learned much from some of them once, but lost my copies in one or another house move; I was glad to be able to revisit them. Pam suddenly said, ‘You must have this one!’ and thrust into my hands John Rackley’s ‘Prayer in Midlife’.

Yeah, thanks, Pam. I’m not 40 yet, you know. Not quite…

She hastened to explain that ‘midlife’ did not mean ‘middle aged’. As John describes it in the paper, it is the collision of a sense of disastisfaction with the life you once struggled to construct for yourself, and the acceptance of the wounds, and the wounds to come, that those areas of life you cannot control inflict on you. One of the disconcerting realities of being around people in the retreat movement is their perceptiveness of the truth. Pam was right – this was for me.

John Rackley was the BUGB President who welcomed me into accredited ministry at the end of my less-than-glorious probationary period. In the paper he quotes Theilard and Jung; hardly my normal sources. But the practical suggestions are powerful. ‘Consider how your gifts have been a source of pain and suffering to you and to others.’ Ouch. But, yes – those wounds and that guilt are there, pricking and debilitating, making me hesitate to do the very things that God has, graciously, enabled me to be some use at.

It happens I have a retreat booked later this month. This time, from afar, Pam and John will be my guides.

Expository preaching

At the BUGB/BMS Assembly, I had the privilege of giving the George Beasley-Murray Memorial Lecture, on preaching, and of listening to several excellent examples of the art, notably from Pat Took and Lauran Bethell. Sally Nelson’s Whitley lecture, whilst not preaching, was academically excellent, pastorally sensitive, and personally moving – an impressive combination.

I made a comment in passing about ‘expository preaching’ in the course of my lecture which has led me to further reflection on the theme, following the thoughts of Haddon Robinson. He cautions, in his Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages, that we should understand ‘expository preaching’ to be a philosophy of preaching, not a method of preaching (p. 20). There is nothing magical about working through a text word by word, verse by verse, or whatever. Indeed, as I suggested in passing in my lecture, it is extraordinarily hard to do this well: the older preachers – Origen, Chrysostom, Augustine – did it by using all the techniques of classical rhetoric to add shape and colour to what might have been a very flat discourse; Pat Took gave the best example I’ve heard in a long time at the Assembly, not least by using different voices to bring illustrations of her points from literature, and to punctuate the shape of her sermon; but ‘this verse says this; that verse says that; …’ is usually pretty deadly, and the exaltation of it to some magical perfect method of preaching is merely bizarre. Understood as a philosophy, as a claim that, whatever the method and shape of the sermon, it is constructed to enable the message of the text to make its claim on the hearers, ‘expository preaching’ is vital, however – or so Robinson claims.

This seems to me precisely right, and it captures a couple of the emphases I made in my lecture. On the one hand, preaching finds its only reality in announcing and applying a message that is discovered through disciplined exegesis of the sacred text. If that is not happening, it is not preaching (it might be an inspiring lecture on a religious theme, but that is still not preaching). On the other hand, however, if the goal of preaching is to reshape and to change lives and worlds, not merely to inform and instruct (and I take it that this is the goal of preaching, for various reasons outlined in the lecture), then there is a need, under God, to select rhetorical methods that are best directed towards effecting such change. This will, of course, mean that we preach in extended monologues (which, and every communications professional I have read agrees, are the best way to effect change of behaviour in human beings); it will also mean that we give attention to all the skills of using such monologues to change hearts and minds, and a dry recitation of information is, oddly enough, not one of them.

Exposition as a philosophy, never deviated from; but methods drawn from far and wide – plotted moves and Lowry loops and constructed narratives, and all the rest. Perhaps I could call in ‘Ancient-future preaching’ and make some money?

Living in the real world

I’ve commented fairly often in conversation that the only downside of having moved to St Andrews is, when faced with the most irritating comment that comes to pastors and academics alike, ‘But you don’t live in the real world, do you?’ I now simply have to admit, no; this strange and marvelous town is many things, but it is just a little too like fairyland to be ‘the real world’.

The thought came back to me when I noticed that several friends (including Andy and Craig) had launched an initiative at the recent BUGB/BMS Assembly called Real Life Worship. The stated aim (in a post by Andy) is this:

It is an attempt to connect real life to worship. Worship that forms us relationally, politically, socially and economically.

Now, I understand the point, and I support it wholeheartedly (and I love the prayer that forms the first substantial blog post), but I find the language odd – and actually slightly disturbing. What is ‘real life,’ or ‘the real world’? If we interrogate the use of the terms, it tends to end up in one of two places: either finance, or a place of naked suffering. (To their credit, Andy, Craig, and friends seem not to have fallen into either of these traps; rather they are aiming at something like ‘the rest of life’ or ‘ordinary living’).

The notion that there is something ontologically basic (’real’) about finance is merely ridiculous. Like all idols, money is a fiction, one which we once found useful but now have imbued with so much authority over our lives that it has the ability to destroy us. (This concept of idolatry from 1 Cor 8.) Money may be powerful, but it is in no way ‘real’. It makes promises that it is unable to keep (’I promise to pay the bearer on demand…’ – the notes I current have in my wallet carry this promise from RBS, and it seems a little hollow), on which we choose to build our lives (and so we have reconstructed our society in far-reaching ways to protect me, and RBS, from their defaulting on that promise). Our choice does not make it ‘real’ – it merely makes us foolish.

Alternatively, ‘the real world’ is the place where struggle and suffering is most visible and desperate. There is something more ‘authentic’ about life on an urban estate (or in the face of urban poverty) than in the comfortable suburbs. This idea is more explicable than the previous one: human reactions in contexts of suffering and poverty are generally more immediate and direct, less covered over by the mores of polite society. But still, is this ‘real’?

I presume that God is real. Our reality is the truth of our being as intended and determined by God. It would be tempting to become slightly Buddhist at this point, and claim suffering as illusion, but that would be wrong. East of Eden, God’s determination of human life is gospel shaped, following the pattern of cross-and-resurrection. Suffering is real, but only within this wider narrative.

What, however, of where I started: pastoral ministry; academic life; the practice of worship?

I claim no privilege for the academy, but I’m not sure that I am prepared to accept any necessary deficit, either. A particular moment of  academic life, or a whole academic career, may proceed at some disconnection from reality, but there is nothing necessary or even likely about that. We are as capable as surrending to the idol of financially-driven priorities, and so living unreal lives, as anyone else, but not more so, as far as I can see; we are capable of devoting ourselves to chasing irrelevancies, but so are many others.

Pastoral ministry I do claim privilege for. The calling of the pastor is, by the ministry of Word and sacrament, to be a constant reminder of the real world in the lives of those who chase idols or illusions, and to fit them for reality.

Worship, finally, and back to Andy’s language: ‘connecting real life to worship’? How can we imagine worship that is not connected to ‘real life,’ the life God is forming within us and fitting us for? Worship is real life, pretty much; all other life is ‘real’ only insofar as it is ordered by worship.

(Of course, I realise that the ‘Real Life Worship’ folks know this, and are precisely aiming to find modes of worship that usefully order the rest of life so it becomes real – an urgent and necessary task; I’m not trying to criticise what they are doing, only reflecting on a chance turn of phrase.)

Bats with baby faces in the violet light

So, I changed the randomly generated avatars for people with no uploaded pictures from geometric patterns to cartoon faces. Apparently, they generate from your email address, so that you always get the same one. I hope no-one is offended by the way they came out…