Tag: Christianity

How to give money anonymously to friends

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Quite by accident today I came across a fascinating question.  If you know someone in the UK, who is struggling financially, just how, in practical terms, do you give them money? 

I’m not the first to ask this question.  The recession has kicked in, and some people are really struggling.  Others are doing OK.  And we all know what the bible has to say about giving.  But … how?

If I had a friend and offered him money, he’d almost certainly decline.  He wouldn’t want to be obligated.  If he accepted, it would probably change our relationship forever.  Or if I knew of a stranger who needed something, it would be even worse.

You can’t write a cheque, because your name will be on it.  These days  money-laundering legislation tends to make it impossible to obtain a cheque from a building society without a name on it.  And you wouldn’t want to post it anyway, because how do you get an acknowledgement that it has gone to the right place, and not been stolen by a postman?

Of course one could sneak up to their door, wearing a rubber Tony Blair mask, and stuff an envelope full of twenty pound notes through the door.  That would do it, for relatively small sums.  You could write on it something about “I don’t need this.  I believe that you do.  When the time comes, repay me by being generous to someone else.”  But of course this strategy is full of risks itself!

A google search reveals results entirely from the USA.  That is very creditable to the generosity of this nation; less so, to the generosity in the UK, or Australia, or wherever.

Anyone any ideas?

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Two visions of the world

Posted on by Roger Pearse

During the reign of Tiberius, two rather different visions of the world were set forth.

The first consists of a selection of anecdotes illustrating moral themes, in ten books, produced by a certain Valerius Maximus.  Much of made of old Roman virtue and severity.  A father executes a son who has charged the enemy without orders, even though he has put the foe to rout.  The Roman virtues appear, and the fear of luxury and enervation, which affects the Greek and orientals.

It is a bracing book, in many ways.  The picture of virtue given is an impressive one, on the whole.  But it is a picture of men attempting to be stoics, and the highest virtue is that of Scipio Africanus and Cato the Younger.

Doubtless the picture was enjoyed by the emperor.  Men of power often enjoy reading about the virtues of older days than their own, and the simple, honest peasant and his household.  The histories of Livy were written for this sort of audience.  The anecdotes doubtless were well-known to all the important people at the centre of the Roman world.  It gives a vision of Romanitas, the guiding principles of the world as it was and would be.

The other  vision was enunciated by a travelling preacher in the same period, also under Tiberius.  He lived far from the centre of power, exercised no political power and was eventually arrested and executed on frivolous charges.  His followers recorded his vision, and another compiled another volume, full of interesting anecdotes of the man and his teachings, by the end of the same century.  The preacher was, of course, our Lord Jesus Christ.

I wonder what Valerius Maximus would have thought, to learn that, in writing his carefully compiled volume, directed to the Great and the Good, he had missed the chance to listen to the Son of God and hear the words that would determine the nature of the world for the next 2,000 years?

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Stick with your work

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Some wise words from the Trevin Wax blog today:

Stick with your work.

Do not flinch because the lion roars.
Do not stop to stone the devil’s dogs.
Do not fool away your time chasing the devil’s rabbits.

Do your work.

Let liars lie.
Let sectarians quarrel.
Let critics malign.
Let enemies accuse.
Let the devil do his worst.

But see to it nothing hinders you from fulfilling with joy the work God has given you.

He has not commanded you to be admired or esteemed.
He has never bidden you defend your character.
He has not set you at work to contradict falsehood (about yourself)
which Satan’s or God’s servants may start to peddle,
or to track down every rumor that threatens your reputation.
If you do these things, you will do nothing else.
You will be at work for yourself and not for the Lord.

Keep at your work.
Let your aim be as steady as a star.
You may be assaulted, wronged, insulted, slandered,
wounded and rejected, misunderstood, or assigned impure motives;
You may be abused by foes, forsaken by friends,
and despised and rejected of men.
But see to it with steadfast determination,
with unfaltering zeal,
that you pursue the great purpose of your life and object of your being
until at last you can say, “I have finished the work which Thou gavest me to do.”

– Anonymous

Of course on this blog we wonder who wrote it and where it comes from…

There’s an excellent article by Seth Barnes on Responding to unfair criticism; it appears in a comment to this.  A Google Books search reveals nothing before 1998.  It would be interesting to know the source.

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Reading George Barna, “Revolution”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A friend handed me a copy of this book, which basically suggests that Christians need not belong to a local church, and that to do so is empowering.  There is a review of it all here. 

I’m committed to read all the way through it, but I have some questions after only 30 pages.

To me, it smells of brimstone.  Let me explain.

One of the things that I am forced to do when browsing online is to see atheist literature, and I always notice their flaws.  These items always rely on tricking the reader, combined with flattering him for his knowingness in “seeing through” that which he does not wish to believe anyway.  After a while, you learn to spot the points at which the writer switches the meaning of a word, or deliberately confuses two things together.  So I tend to read all books with an eye for these tricks.

Few are aware that the devil puts out books from time to time, which are supposedly designed to help Christians but in reality are designed to deconvert them.  The authors, indeed, may not be aware of what they are doing, or may have no such intention.  That isn’t the point. 

I have a feeling that putting out these books is a standard Satanic ploy.   But I haven’t researched it enough to know. Here are a few ideas, off the top of my head.

Tertullian ca. 215 AD references a similar idea in the opening words of “Adversus Praxean”.

Manifold are the ways in which the devil has sought to undermine the truth.  He is now trying to crush it, by pretending to defend it.

Some will remember John Robinson’s “Honest to God” from the 1960’s, in the middle of the permissive revolution, which apparently convinced many that abandoning Christianity was the right thing to do, and that they should go off and indulge in the vices being promoted in that period. 

Others may remember Dave Tomlinson’s “The post-evangelical”.  Now I don’t know what effect that had in general, but I do remember a girl who was tottering in her faith being recommended it, and losing her faith and her morals immediately afterwards, and indeed worse followed.  She at least thought that the book helped her along the road to ruin.

Knowing that such things exist, and that the devil really does want Christians not to go to church, I have a feeling that “Revolution” may well be one of these nasty items. 

You see, I notice that the first 30 pages consist almost entirely of flattery of the reader.  There were a number of points at which he attributes specifically to his “revolutionaries”, for no apparent reason, things which are generally true of all Christians, as if to suggest that not going to church is the only way to Salvation.  He doesn’t actually say that; but the reader is led  to believe it.  God doesn’t use these techniques, but Satan does.

Now I have no idea how much “tricky” literature most of us get to read, but I thought that I would put people on their guard.  I’m not writing the book off; but something is not right here.  We’ll see what the remainder of the book looks like.

UPDATE: Well, I’ve read the rest of it.  And … it doesn’t contain an argument.  It really does not.  Instead it relies on the methods of persuasion familiar to us from advertising: show us something, use loaded language to suggest sub-rationally that it must be good, bark a bit at the “fuddy-duddies” who try to resist, and adopt a tone of piety.  The purpose, remember, is to say that not bothering with church is a good thing, or at least an indifferent thing; but he doesn’t actually say so directly.

I’m a simple soul.  If someone wants to persuade me of something, I want to see his argument, laid out fair and square with no weasel-words or loaded language, and the evidence for it.  Then I can evaluate his case.  When an author doesn’t do this, I get mighty suspicious.

The proposition of the book seems to be that (a) millions of US Christians are abandoning the churches, (b) they call themselves — or he calls them (he is vague on this) — revolutionaries (no loaded language, then), (c) abandoning the local church is a good thing (nowhere stated, contradicted at least once, but inferred throughout), (d) if you abandon the church you will be moving positively forward with God (despite bit tacked on the front portraying, as an alternative, a backslider), and (e) if you try to resist, you must be deficient or angry or threatened (recognise the ad hominem argument in this, and the attempt at emotional manipulation of a reluctant reader who senses something is wrong but not what). 

The reader is led to suppose — it isn’t stated — that this is all happening, therefore it must be good.  I’m sure we all recognise the classic fallacy of “this happens=this is right”.  Quite a lot of things happen, in the way of trends, which are disastrously wrong.  I admit to utter disinterest as to whether “millions” (who counted them? did they fill in a form?) of Americans are all now Barna-ian “Revolutionaries” (do they all get vetted for quality?  By whom?), or indeed whether they all dance the hokey-cokey.  In matters to do with God, I want to know whether something is right, not whether it is popular.  And this question is simply not addressed.

Throughout the book plays fast and loose with the reader, by talking about things that every Christian should expect, as if they are only things that people who don’t go to church can experience.  This is very naughty. 

It’s filled with great quantities of irrelevant material.  I want to see the argument; I want to see the evidence.  Instead I find things like chapter 5 (Spiritual transitions in the making) which has no apparent relevance to the question at all.  Likewise the material in chapter 6 (God is active today) is true, whether or not going to a local church is a good idea, a bad idea, or the kernel idea for a mini-series on NBC about mud-wrestling.  In other words, it’s irrelevant to the thesis being advanced.

One element of Chapter 6 amused me, cynic that I am.  Barna suggests starting on p.53 that “mini-movements” are important, and show how obsolete the church is getting.  But … they’re so important that he only describes them in one sentence on p.54!  I was left wondering what he was on about.  Clearly they are NOT important to him!  If he was enthusiastic about them, he’d have said more.  Based on number of words devoted to each, this said to me that it is getting rid of the local church that matters, not whatever these mini-movements might be.

Let’s step back a bit.  It is absolutely right to notice that some committed Christians get bored with their local churches, and tend to stop going.  Many of them remain fervently committed to Christ.  It would be a very good thing to find some way to linking these up in such a way that they can get fellowship in whatever ways work for them.  Local churches certainly can be awful places.  We can all agree on this.

But … Barna’s book goes a very long way beyond this.  A reasonable reader will suppose that the local church is actually a barrier to spiritual development.  The book seems designed to inculcate this message.  The object is to get Christians to think that they are moving forward with God, simply by sitting at home on Sunday morning (for no concrete proposals are offered for anything else).  And that is not merely nonsense — it seems pretty clear whose agenda that statement serves.  It isn’t God’s, of that we may be sure.

I find myself rather angry, in truth.  This is not an honest book, in my opinion.  It’s a piece of contrived poison.  How on earth did a Christian publisher put this out?  Have they no duty to their readers? 

I fear that George Barna has unwittingly acted as an agent for Hell here.  If so, of course, he needs our prayers.

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40 days of prayer – an online Lent meditation

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I came across a blog run by Community Church Derby — about which I know nothing — here.  The blog is a set of daily thoughts on Psalm 23, for Lent. 

The item for Sunday 18th March struck me particularly:

Sunday 18th March ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me, your rod and staff they comfort me.’

God, our Shepherd, wants to guide us. The question is will we allow him to guide us? Will we allow him to be our compass, our reference point in life? Christianity is not a system of beliefs that we choose to sign up to the try our best to live up to, it’s a call to a radical new way of life which involves making a daily decision to allow God, our Shepherd to lead us and give our life direction, meaning and purpose.

The Sheep: Pray for someone you know who is self-employed and for those who work mostly alone during the day, maybe in the home. Pray against feelings of loneliness and that they would know God’s presence with them in the hours of work.

There are a lot of lonely people out there, you know.  There are a lot of people also, whose work prevents them from really meeting people, even if they sit in an office.  I’ve encountered a number of these over the last couple of months, and I have been struck by how alone most people are. 

Giving our life meaning, seeking every day God’s will in our decisions … what does this mean, in practice?  Or do we just drift on, doing what we always do, and asking for His help only in crises?  The answer, surely, will differ for each of us.  We can, at least, all ask God how He wants us to play this.

Note that the church in question uses “radical” in its proper sense, of returning to the root (radix) of Christian teaching in the New Testament.

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A portrait of a damned soul

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An old college friend died a couple of years ago.  I only found out a week or so ago, when I did something that I never do — I logged into Friends Reunited.  A menu highlighted that someone that I knew at college had a page, and it was him.

The page was written by him.  It discussed his life, and gave his thoughts about it.  And then someone had added a note at the bottom with news of his death.

The page made rather sad reading.  His career https://www.highlandpediatricdental.com/antabuse-disulfiram/ evidently never went anywhere, and then he gave it up and took a series of short-term jobs, unsuited to a man of his abilities.

This man was an Oxford graduate.  He was brighter than I am, and was in the year above me at college, doing the same subject.  We were, in some ways, very similar people, and I got on well with him. 

In imagination I can still see his window in the Rose Lane Annex.  It was often lit late at night.  I remember going up to see him, at some late hour, as students do, and finding him playing LP’s of Russian composers — he introduced me to Shostakovich — and drinking strange teas.  The one I remember looked more like logwood chippings than tea!  We would discuss politics, in which we were both active, although he was slightly more right-wing than myself.

He had grown up among Christians.  He owned a number of Graham Kendrick LP’s, which I took care to copy.  His parents were simple folk, delighted to have so intelligent a son. 

But he had rejected Christ at some point before I knew him.  I remember him complaining about the Christian Union at college — made up of the brightest that England could produce, remember — that it was not intellectual enough.  He said that he had been along to a bible study, and that he and another would discuss the Greek of the passage, while everyone else looked blank.

But I also remember learning something else about him.  There was a debate in the Union, and I spoke, somewhat ineptly, against the newly fashionable promotion of unnatural vice.  To my surprise he got up — we were sitting together — and spoke for it.  Later he told me that he had become a homosexual.  I didn’t throw him out — indeed I couldn’t really believe it, and tended to treat the profession as one of his eccentricities — but it was odd.  In time he went down from college, as we all did, and I saw him no more.  I kept in contact for a couple of years, but then lost contact with him, and with others of my time at college.

The page https://www.carolinasmilesnc.com/ambien-zolpidem-online/ makes clear that he never married.  It contains what is perhaps the saddest phrase I ever saw:

I have no children (that I know of).

What self-inflicted emptiness lies behind those words!  I fear that, before I knew him, he came up to college and Satan drew him into sin, to reject Christ, and then on into unnatural vice, thereby cutting him off from everyone.  I remember him saying https://www.bordeauxcenter.com/ativan-lorazepam/ that he could no longer relate to his parents, in times of trouble.

Now he is dead.  He died at 48 (I think), alone.  What sort of life did he have?  Not much, from the look of it.  Yet he was a marvellous creation of God’s, a “character” in the best sort of way, one that Dickens would have delighted to draw.

He was a decent chap, I always felt, and yet, on the face of it, he lived a miserable life and died without God.  Who can doubt his damnation?  His life was empty.  He neither made himself happy, nor did what God asked.  Poor soul! 

Let us hope that I am wrong, and that, before he died, he repented and turned back to God. 

It is a sobering warning to us all, to take heed of ourselves.  This is not a rehearsal.  This is not play-acting.  This life … this is it.  Either turn to God, or lose even what we think we choose instead.

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Glenn Myers, Life Lessons : life-changing stories for Christian growth

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Over the last few days, I have been reading life lessons: life-changing stories for christian growth, ed. Glenn Myers, Christian Focus, 2010.  It’s a slim paperback, less than 100 pages.  It consists of ten chapters, in each of which someone reflects on their life, and how God has worked in it.

It’s been enormously helpful to me, because it’s real.  These are people who have had real problems.  They have not always overcome them, but had to learn to live with them.  Yet they all know God, and are faithful to him.

It’s also easy to read, and intelligent.

I won’t give a link to an online shop.  Go to your Christian bookshop and support them by buying or ordering it.  It will do you good.

All of us need something to aspire to.  Books of Christian testimony can sometimes be a little corny, or superficial.  This one is gold.

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Does God only use “people” people?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Does God only use the ‘people’ people? 

There are two sorts of people out there.  There are those focused on other people, and there are the task- or thing-oriented people.  I know that I am in the latter class, and indeed I only function among others by means of some carefully fabricated plastic personalities.  Most of us, perhaps, do the same. 

It’s like getting a lame dog over a stile.  Some people will pick up the lame dog and lift it over the stile.  Others will look at the stile and say, “We need to redesign this stile so that lame dogs can get themselves through it.”

Neither is wrong.  Temperament comes into this a lot.

But … does God only want the first sort?  It sometimes seems so.  Certainly those who are NOT people oriented find only a marginal role in most Christian activity.  They get set to do the magazine, or stuff like that (hey, I’ve been there!)  Can we think of a thing-oriented person in the bible?

It’s worth praying about.  God calls us to be like Him, to submit to Him, to be changed by Him into what he meant us to be. 

So how does it work for those of us who are socially awkward, rather isolated?  What does God want of us?

And, of course … how on earth do we ever get married, if the Christian girls all want to marry the other sort!

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Finding Christians in your local town in the UK

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve been trying to connect with Christians in my local area.  It’s always a tiresome process, when you move to a new town, and a lot of people do not manage to make the transfer.

Traditionally you made the rounds of the local churches, in a series of Sunday services; the good, the bad, the mad and the embarrassing.  If you were lucky, you found someone who you could relate to, and settled in that church.  If you weren’t — and a lot of people weren’t — you got more and more embarrassed, and gave up after church number four-to-eight (depending on your persistence level).

But the web has made quite a difference, I find.  People are setting up sites to network people.  In my own town, for instance, a search on “<town name> Christians” brings up some dubious sites and then a site which contains a calendar of events, lists of projects, and so forth.  It’s not perfect, and there are dreck “events” in there, but it gives you a bit more than you might otherwise get.  The newcomer can at least go along to some of the evidently larger events and see a cross-section of people from the area.

Facebook is also coming into its own.  You get things in Derby like the Derby Community Church on FB here, with a link to its own website; and the Derby City Mission here.  In some ways these are more useful than the standalone websites, since they get updates and can be watched for news.

It’s really hard for Christians who move town to integrate into the new community, whether they are single or married.  There seems to be practically no horizontal communication.  I wonder how many of those people who leave Christian Unions when they leave college every summer, most of whom go to new towns, actually make it through and get hooked up to the Christian community in their new town.  Few, I would guess.

Surely something could be done?

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Christian bookshops — the key part of the local church?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I did something unusual today.  I didn’t buy a book from Amazon.

Not that I buy a book every day from Amazon: I mean that I decided to buy a book, but to order it in from my local Christian bookshop.

Almost certainly it will cost more.  But the Christian bookshop is a funny thing.  That’s because it isn’t really just a bookshop.

A friend gave me the name of the manager of my local one at Christmas, and I’ve popped in and introduced myself.  Suddenly I find myself connected to a network of people who know people, or know of someone.  Today I wanted to learn of someone connected to me who was working in the church in a town in the south of England, in order to  help someone.  The lady knew of someone.  For the managers of these places effectively function as an information exchange.

The pastoral role of the Christian bookshop is invisible unless you know that it is there.  Yet this too is critical — you can go in, and find people to talk to.  The churches themselves — I mean real churches — are lamentably bad at working together in a single small town, and the common need of their members for books means that the bookshop acts as a centre, a place where notices are displayed and people congregate. 

Some bookshops take it a step further and add on a coffee shop.  St Aldates bookshop in Oxford ca. 1980 did just that.  It was very cramped, but then students don’t mind that at all.  I often went there as a convenient place to meet.

Christian bookshops came into being in the 60’s and 70’s because bookshops and news agents would not stock popular Christian paperback books or publications.  You could order them, but this involved a long wait, no chance of browsing and often was frankly a faff. 

Consequently the publishers started to set up retail outlets where their wares could be displayed.  Since Christians always wanted the books of Michael Green or David Watson, they naturally became information exchanges.

The convenience of internet shopping means that it will usually be quicker and cheaper to buy a book at Amazon.   That was not the case back in the day, since the Net Book Agreement standardised book prices anyway. 

So the problem is that the modern Christian bookshop has no real economic basis.  The publishers are finding them unviable.  They can now sell their books through Amazon.

Yet the bookshop is needed.  Indeed if you want some advice on books to buy — as I did today — what use is Amazon?

I don’t know what the answer is, I admit.  Let us pray that God finds a way around this.  Change is inevitable; but not at the price of wiping out the bookshop.

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