It’s not long since I got home from our training centre where we were having a prayer and training day today. Along with one of our officers, I was giving a seminar on Human Traffiking and then we prayed about the issue. The seminar happened twice and a total of 23 people sat through it and then prayed afterwards. It doesn’t sound a lot by I’m pleased as its 23 more people who understand a little more about this evil practice.
Personally, I found talking about Human Traffiking and the sex trade incredibly difficult and at the end of the second seminar felt almost dirty at having had to talk about the things that this world allows to happen.
I’m so grateful that we have someone who we can turn to, who understands far better the pain and grief that this trade forces upon people. I’m so grateful that our God is about freedom and that He sent His son so that we can offer true freedom to everyone we come into contact with.
Nothing I did over the first 32 years of my life really prepared me for the challenges that Jesus has sent our way in the 5 years since we came to Latvia. Other than the year I spent on Frontline (a year out programme of the Oasis Trust and The Salvation Army) I had been sat behind a desk virtually my whole working life. My experience with children was limited to a small amount of Sunday School teaching in my teens and some work with youth for a few months in my mid-twenties.
For the first 19 years of my life I managed to live in a sort of Christian comfort zone. It was almost like a tacit agreement between me and the Army! I would stick as much as possible to the things I signed up to when I became a soldier and the Army would provide me with a nice safe environment in which to express my faith. If I’m totally honest I wasn’t really satisfied but at least no-one was going to get their proverbial knickers in a twist if I didn’t do things right.
Then things changed! The fact that I was unsatisfied with things slowly became more and more obvious to me. I started to challenge things and started to pray for a different sort of experience. On the whole I was still firmly ensconced in a comfortable lifestyle but was starting to find it a little claustrophobic.
Only as I got older though did I really realise the real problem was that the tacit message I had received about Church was wrong. Jesus never promised that following Him would lead us to have a comfortable lifestyle. On the contrary He make it very clear in Luke 9:57-62
that following Him is costly and would challenge us to the very core of our being.
All growth comes from stretching oneself past the comfort zone that limits us. Risk is a necessary part of the reward. You cannot have one without the other.
I don’t do it often enough, but whenever I step outside my comfort zone - I grow.
I’m not sure where I got the above quotes and, as far as I know, they are not from Christians, but they reflect a truth that is essential for us to understand. Stepping out of the comfort zone maybe one of the most important things that a Christian can do in their walk with Christ.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve read a number of articles that have used the word “subversive” in connection to either the gospel or the church. The gist of these were that Christianity is actually a deeply subversive worldview.
By it’s very nature the gospel and therefore the Church works as a force for good, subverting (?) society so that it turns away from cultural norms and turns to face God. This picture of a subversive underground trying to turn society away from its destructive path appeals to me, yet something about it makes me feel uncomfortable.
This discomfort is not due to wanting to live in the comfort of modern western society, but instead is to do with the very word “subversive”. Looking up theverb subvert at Dictionary.com gave me this definition:
1. to overthrow (something established or existing).
2. to cause the downfall, ruin, or destruction of.
3. to undermine the principles of; corrupt. Retrieved September 28, 2006, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/subvert
There is something very negative about this word! I love the connotations of overthrowing societal norms and of causing the downfall of the non-Christian worldview, but it all seems so negative!
When I read the Bible even though there is a subversive element to some of the stories the emphasis feels more positive. For me I wonder whether instead of being a subversive influence on society we should instead think in terms of being restorative.
It’s not that I don’t want to “turn the world upside down” but sometimes I think we concentrate too much on changing the world’s system and too little on bringing in God’s Kingdom! In many ways it is the same thing just said differently, but I do think there is a distinction between the two. Instead of subverting the world again, which is after all what happened with the fall, we should be working towards restoring God’s original plan.
About 3 months ago the General, Chief of Staff and the World President of Women’s Ministries called the worldwide Salvation Army to a weekend of prayer for the victims of sex trade trafficking. This is happening this coming weekend and on Saturday we have a Prayer and training day at our Training Centre where a colleague and myself will be teaching on the subject of Human Trafficking.
This is an issue that actually touches the lives of people here in Latvia and a lot has been done in schools recently to try to increase awareness of the issues. The sad fact though is that the promise of a better life overseas causes some young women to fall into the hands of human traffickers. At the same time there is a growing sex trade in Riga, spurred on by the rapid increase in tourism. It seems almost every nightclub in the city has some sort of stripshow or lap-dancing aspect, and an increasing number of bars also have poles for dancers. This is already, and will continue in the future, having an impact on the number of young women being forced into prostitution, including many from even more impoverished areas of Europe and Central Asia.
If you want to know more about the worldwide issue then go to the International Headquarters website and check out the resources there.
This is the phrase that I have just seen on The Salvation Army UK Territory’s prayer request forum. Now it might well be my misunderstanding, but it just seems too simplistic and I honestly could not believe that someone would encourage people in this way. My understanding of prayer is that we are supposed to do is pray “without ceasing” (1 Thes 5:17) and that it is this depth of prayer that helps to keep our eyes firmly on the Lord.
Over at lublink.ca there is an interesting conversation going on about the “emerging church” and whether it is a valid model of church. The bit that stuck out for me was a comment that:
…sitting around drinking coffee is not an acceptable substitute for going to a more traditional worship service. IMHO.
Now what I’m intrigued about is what constitutes “worship” and in particular what constitutes corporate worship, which I think is the issue that is really at hand.I’m not sure I have a real answer to the question myself, but I’m slowly but surely realising that true corporate worship is not constrained anywhere near as much as the boxes we try to put it into.
For example I can cast my mind back to a conversation I had with a small group of people when I worked for the Anglican Church in the UK. The people involved were friends and colleagues and they were having a discussion about the merits of “happy, clappy worship”. Two people in particular were extremely opposed to this medium saying that the root of any spiritual experience within it was caused by emotion rather than the Holy Spirit!
Being in a corps at a time that was well and truly within the “happy, clappy” branch of expression this did not sit too happily with me. Now these two came from what has been called the “Bells & Smells” form, ie the form that is firmly in the classical music and incense burning end of the worship spectrum. I questioned them that the same could surely be of this style of worship. I was told in no uncertain terms that to question a form of worship that had been proven over many years and had given them deep and personal experiences of God was totally uncalled for and simply proved their point!
More than anything I think this shows just how deeply attached we are to the styles of worship that we are used to. We feel comfortable in them and this can very easily lead to us believing that this expression is the only valid form and that God is unable to speak to us through anything else!
Now I won’t begin to claim that I have experienced all types of worship but I have been in many styles. Even so I’m not sure I would find Brethren style worship or Quaker styles very easy to cope with.
So that brings us back to the question in hand. Can the emerging church with it’s widely varied styles of worship which are often very different to the ways of corporate worship we are used to really be an “acceptable substitute”?
It might be possible that you have had difficulty reading this site over the weekend. Unfortunately, as I am still learning how to use the back-end stuff on the server I managed to delete or change an important file. This meant I had to put in a new installation of the software and transfer everything across. This was made worse by the fact that our flat has no electricity in our bedroom (where the computer is) which meant I was working in the dark in more ways than one!
Hopefully things are ok now, but if you do have a problem please drop me a line through the contact form!
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