"The nutbags...had it right the whole time"

I'm not a film buff, so it should come as no surprise that I never saw 2012 in the cinema and only managed to watch the dvd version with my teenage son on Friday evening.

It's a good yarn in the disaster movie tradition. It does go on; it morphed from a kind of The Late Great Planet Earth meets 24 to Indiana Jones meets Evan Almighty. (For our younger readers The Late Great Planet Earth was a 1970's end-times biblical blockbuster. Although one might question some of its conclusions, it was absolutely compulsive reading - even for a teenager. You can purchase a used copy at Amazon for 36p! I hadn't realised until writing up this post that it was turned into a film starring Orson Welles.).

Mayan prophecies, conspiracy theorists, good guys and bad guys and the triumph of the human spirit - you can find it all in 2012.

It really has very little to do with what the Bible teaches about the last days. And the church comes over as quite anemic and helpless. The only people who seems to have any clue about what's happening are the scientists, an eccentric talk show host, a little known author and - wait for it - according to Carl Anheuser, the bad guy in the White House "the nutbags with cardboard signs" who " had it right the whole time."

It was the nutbags with cardboard signs line that got me. It raised a few questions. Like "Who defines reality?" and "How willing are we to talk about the reality of the future with our lost friends?"

The quote recalled a discussion I had had earlier in the day. It concerned whether we should preach about the end of the world and the themes associated with it at guest services. Do we really want to bring our friends to church and then talk about the end of the world?! (Would love your thoughts on that one.)

About two years ago, I decided to read through Acts to try and learn how to preach the gospel like the apostles - Peter and Paul in particular. I had a few surprises. One was the focus that there seemed to be on the world to come and how history was heading towards the day when God would judge the world. See Acts 2.40, 3.21-23, 17.31, 24.25, for example.

What struck me about this emphasis was not that the apostles were preaching a happy heaven v. a hot hell. It was different to that. I think that they set out to present the gospel not only as a means of personal salvation, but as a means of personal salvation that required you to completely change your outlook on the whole of human history and the destiny of the world. And in this story of God, humanity and the world, Christ was bang in the centre.

If we can't find some way of communicating the full story of the gospel, two things are likely to happen:

Firstly, the gospel might - just might - be received and understood as a kind of self-help message, a formula for a happier life;

Secondly, we will allow secular people, Islam and Christian cults / sects (e.g. JWs, Mormons) to shape how people think about the future of the world. And believe me, no-one from these sectors of the religious market is shy about how they see the future;

Finally, there is a real danger that the church will lose its cutting edge as it tries to conform itself to this world rather than being conformed to the values of the world to come: "Everyone who has this hope in him, purifies himself" says the apostle John, speaking of the return of the Lord (1 John 3.3).

I'm not really suggesting that we take to the streets with cardboard signs. I am advocating that we do present the whole of the gospel story, which includes the return of Christ and the final establishment of his kingdom. God forbid that anyone ever ask "Why didn't you tell us?" And we can only reply "I was afraid you might think I was a nutbag".

Heads and hearts

Giving away Easter eggs at Easter - along with invites to the Easter services - in the centre of one of the great cities of the world is hardly the most radical approach to evangelism ever invented.

First and foremost it is an attempt to make a positive connection with a society from which I think the church has become increasingly disconnected. Oddly enough it seems that as we have grown ever more like the world we are trying to reach, we seem to have become more distant from it. Now that is odd.

These sorties into the heart of places where Mammon has his throne are actually very enlightening as well as enjoyable.

Time and again the feedback is of people who have never been told before that God loves them. Of people disarmed by Christians who smile and give something away gratis.

My most interesting moment came when I had a conversation with a couple of late 20 perhaps early 30 somethings. They were giving away a flyer entitled "Sex Sells". It was all a gimmick to promote a brand of designer jeans.

We had a little chat about church and religion. They didn't attend church because they were very busy and he was an agnostic to boot. But they did have a great respect for the church and what it does for young people. This busy agnostic really did surprise me when he said that he was shocked by the lack of manners in society today. Things just weren't what they used to be.

What he didn't seem to realise, or at least if he did, it had no bearing on his actions, was that the kind of unmannerly behaviour that so upset him was the result of the same kind of outlook that promoted jeans by using fairly obvious sexual imagery.

It reminded me of what David Baddiel said in an interview. When asked about his Jewishness he explained that he was “an atheist in my head but a Jew in my heart”.

I wonder how many people live with a head that is uninformed by the heart? They have accepted the storyline of secularism - no God, here by chance, make up your own meaning of life, and everything is okay so long as it does no-one any harm - but deep in their hearts they long for the kind of society that has its roots in Christianity and its Jewish mother.

What is it like to live with a heart and head that don't match? Who knows. Perhaps a gnawing sense that something is not right. A sense of disappointment with the world. A deep frustration in not having any way to make sense of it all. And there you have the condition of the Western world.

For sure this doesn't compare with the suffering of many millions in the developing world whose lives are blighted with war, famine and pestilence. But that is the society we are trying to reach. And the man of sorrows who is familiar with suffering died to save the disconnected peoples of the West as much as He died for anyone else. Western people are alienated from God and consequently have become alienated from themselves as well.

The conversation ended with an "If you ever want to talk..." and they both took a flyer with our church details. It wasn't quite Philip meeting the Ethiopian and explaining Isaiah 53, but at least it gave someone the chance to talk about what was really going on in his heart.